NYAB Event - Shu Ohno “The Doodles”

Shu Ohno “The Doodles”

P339 Gallery

This event has ended.

Shu Ohno was born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1981. He received his BFA in Sculpture at Kyunsandai University of Art in Fukuoka in 2004, and his MFA in Sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2006. Prior to this solo show at P339, Ohno has held solo exhibitions in Tokyo, and one in New York City in 2013. He has participated in several group shows internationally including the ISE awards exhibition in 2014. He was also selected for the Keizo Suyemura Award in September of this year.

In Japan, Ohno was also a singer and frontman in a rock band. Much of his artwork employs guitars meticulously worked over with a dremel until they appear to be melted, resembling something dipped in caustic acid. In ‘The Doodles’ Ohno has kept a sense of disorder, but has exchanged organic deterioration with a more man-made ‘adding up’. Odd objects are at the center of his work – toys such as water pistols recovered from garbage bins built up with other toys and broken machine parts. Also new to Ohno’s catalogue is his self portrait, a full scale sculpture suited in part a sci-fi neo-warfare outfit composed of used bits and bobs including plastic toy soldiers. It stands all in white, goggled and with a guitar across its back as an illogical geared-up, post-apocalyptic statue. Ohno’s works call up another realm, but without any color other than white, they do not entice one into free, fantastical thinking. Rather they are cold apparition-like frozen captures of a bizarre alternative future, not of this world, but still limited to it.