NYAB Event - "WHAM! POW! VROOOM! Shinohara 2009!"

"WHAM! POW! VROOOM! Shinohara 2009!"

Ethan Cohen Fine Arts

This event has ended.

Ushio Shinohara: A Living Legend and Artistic Force!

Ushio Shinohara was born in Tokyo in 1932, just when Japan was about to enter an age of great change. This was a time when many of the youth were questioning the accepted cultural norms and many young artists were exploring new artistic forms. In 1957, Shinohara organized the “Neo Dada” group, one of the most radical avant-garde collectives in postwar Japan.

In 1960 two young reporters visited Shinohara in his Tokyo studio, One was from the newspaper Mainichi, the other was , the future Nobel laureate for Literature, Oe Kenzaburo. On the way to Shinohara’s studio, Shinohara said that he had nothing on the walls! Oe insisted to see his works. Having no works in the studio, Shinohara said to the Mainichi reporter, “Lend me 200 yen to buy ink and paper and I will show you something special.” It was here, sporting a Mohawk and bare to the waist with his hands in boxing gloves that had ink-soaked cloth tied around them, that Shinohara first experimented in punching paper that was hung on a wall. With this new form of action painting, Shinohara was challenging the Gutai artist Shiraga’s “feet-painting” of the 1950’s. Shinohara felt that this “Boxing Painting” was “purest kind of art”. Soon, William Klein featured the creation of Shinohara’s boxing work in his 1961 documentary “Tokyo”. In 1991 The National Museum of Art, Osaka showed these early “Boxing Paintings in “Japanese Anti-Art: Now and Then”. In this last decade, Ushio Shinohara’s “Boxing Paintings” have become an area of great interest by museum and academic institutions, as well as private and corporate collectors.

[Image: Ushio in his studio with an unfinished sculpture]

Media

• Painting
• Performance Art

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