Ushio Shinohara

Ushio Shinohara (篠原 有司男, Shinohara Ushio, born January 17, 1932), nicknamed “Gyū-chan”, is a Japanese contemporary painter, sculptor, and performance artist based in New York City. Best known for his vigorously painted, large-scale and dynamic Boxing Painting series, Shinohara makes use of embodied gestures, appropriation and assemblage, iconographies of mass culture and traditional arts, and vivid tones in his diverse, multidisciplinary practice.

A founding member of the short-lived, avant-garde collective Neo-Dada Organizers, Shinohara spent the early years of his life in Tokyo before moving to New York City in 1969, where he continues to live and work. Having grown up in Japan through a time of rapid political change, social upheaval, and increasing Americanization and modernization in the wake of the American occupation, Shinohara's work was shaped by and responsive to the clashing forces in his midst. His energetic confrontations with conventions of both traditional and contemporary artistic canons are filtered through a pop sensibility and an understanding of art-making as a series of ephemeral gestures rather than a results-based process.

His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Leo Castelli Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Japan Society. Shinohara and his wife, Noriko, are the subjects of a documentary film by Zachary Heinzerling called Cutie and the Boxer (2013).

Early life and education Ushio Shinohara was born on January 17, 1932, in the Kōjimachi neighborhood of central Tokyo. His father was a tanka poet who was taught by Wakayama Bokusui, and his mother was a Nihonga painter and doll-maker who studied at the Private Women's School of Fine Arts (present-day Joshibi University of Art and Design) in Tokyo.

Shinohara attended Bancho Elementary School and Azabu Junior and Senior High School, and in 1952, enrolled in Tokyo Art University (known today as the Tokyo University of the Arts), where he studied yōga under the renowned painter Takeshi Hayashi. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, this freewheeling exhibition was unjuried and open to anyone, and thus became a site of artistic experimentation that paved the way for new forms of "anti-art," "non-art," and "junk art."

As there were few art dealers, collectors, and established galleries in Japan at the time, artist-organized group exhibitions and media-sponsored shows were the most popular platform for displaying and engaging with avant-garde, contemporary art. Shinohara was keenly conscious of his public image and sought to craft a persona through media portrayals, persuading the Weekly Sankei to feature him as a (self-dubbed) "rockabilly painter". Struck by the potentials of the modern and open interior, Shinohara declared, "I can do something here!" Shinohara's action painting practice began around this time, drawing from contemporary precedents in gestural abstraction while simultaneously insisting that the action, not the resulting painting, should constitute the artwork itself. Keenly conscious of his public persona, Shinohara accepted media requests from magazines, newspapers, and filmmakers to capture his art-making process. In 1960, novelist Kenzaburō Ōe was commissioned to write a feature on Japanese Beats by Mainichi Graph, which featured Shinohara performing an action painting using sumi ink, kraft paper, and rags wrapped around his wrists. Klein's photographs are some of the few records of Shinohara's performances, and the work of the Neo-Dada group more broadly, as their unconventional materials and transient actions defied archival practices. Their artworks were rarely taken seriously by critics, who merely saw the artists as vulgar, spoiled, anti-intellectual boys indulging in anti-establishment play.

Post Neo-Dada

Oiran In 1965, Shinohara began his Oiran series. The title refers to the high-ranking courtesans from the Edo period, and the works were particularly informed by the famed muzan-e ("atrocity prints") series Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse (1866–7) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Works from the series were featured in a solo exhibition, Doll Festival (Hinamatsuri), at Tokyo Gallery in February 1966, one of the few commercial galleries focused on contemporary art at the time. Upon visiting Shinohara's studio in the early 1960s, Johns, taken with the series, took one of the pieces back home with him. After a stay at the Hotel Chelsea, he moved to fellow artist Ay-O's loft in Chinatown, located in a building occupied by several Fluxus artists including Nam June Paik. Shinohara also recalls having watched the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One while in Japan, and cites it as another source of inspiration. Michael Lobel suggests that Shinohara's interest in the quintessentially American brand may be also read in the context of heightening trade tensions between the United States and Japan during the 1970s. As the popularity of motorcycles steadily grew in the States, so did the number of Japanese imports, which rapidly overtook Harley-Davidson and other American manufacturers, contributing to a broader sentiment of anxiety about Japan's status as an economic competition and consequent limits on automotive exports from Japan following the Nixon shock in 1971. The exhibit marked a radical departure from the venue's typical shows, which focused on traditional arts like tea ceremony and ikebana, and garnered significant attention from critics. Though his earlier works were rendered in black and white, Shinohara began adding color to both the paint and the canvas ground starting in 1998. Shinohara's boxing paintings have continued to receive widespread acclaim internationally. A 2003 commercial for Pocari Sweat featured Shinohara in action, painting against a wall.

Personal life Shinohara is affectionately nicknamed Gyū-chan (ギューチャン, "Little Cow") because his birth name (牛男, also pronounced "Ushio") used the Chinese characters for "cow" and "man."

Shinohara has been married to artist Noriko Shinohara since the early 1970s; together they have a son who is also an artist, Alexander Kūkai Shinohara. Their tumultuous life together as a family was the subject of a 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, directed by Zachary Heinzerling. The family is based in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Shinohara was previously married to a woman in Japan, with whom he has two sons. A retrospective of his work, titled "Shinohara Pops!" was held at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2012.

Collections Shinohara's work is found in multiple public museum collections including: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, the Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Yamamura Collection at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.