26 Facts About Ushio Shinohara

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.

Ushio Shinohara's 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.

Ushio Shinohara was born on January 17,1932, in the Kojimachi neighborhood of central Tokyo.

Ushio Shinohara's 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 in Tokyo.

Ushio Shinohara attended Bancho Elementary School and Azabu Junior and Senior High School, and in 1952, enrolled in Tokyo Art University, where he studied yoga under the renowned painter Takeshi Hayashi.

Ushio Shinohara's classmates included Tetsumi Kudo, Jiro Takamatsu, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, who would become fellow members of the Neo-Dada Organizers.

Dissatisfied with the school's teaching, Ushio Shinohara quit the school in 1957 without completing his degree.

In 1955, Ushio Shinohara began submitting artworks to the unjuried, avant-garde Yomiuri Independant Exhibition and continued to participate in almost every iteration of the annual fair through 1963.

Ushio 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 "rockabilly painter".

In March 1958, Ushio Shinohara paid a visit to Masunobu Yoshimura's newly built studio-residence in Shinjuku, an open plan space with large glass doors and white mortar finish designed by Arata Isozaki.

Ushio Shinohara was keenly aware of the artistic value of self-promotion and immediacy in the age of mass media, and walked around the streets of Ginza with exhibition announcements plastered across his body, in an act that blurred the division between performance and publicity.

At a Neo-Dada event in September 1960 titled Bizarre Assembly, Ushio Shinohara, wearing his trademark mohawk hairstyle, performed his-famous "boxing painting," punching a large piece of paper with boxing gloves that had been dipped in ink numerous times in succession.

Ushio 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, Ushio Shinohara accepted media requests from magazines, newspapers, and filmmakers to capture his art-making process.

In 1960, novelist Kenzaburo Oe was commissioned to write a feature on Japanese Beats by Mainichi Graph, which featured Ushio Shinohara performing an action painting using sumi ink, kraft paper, and rags wrapped around his wrists.

In 1961, renowned photographer William Klein captured Ushio Shinohara's "boxing painting" on film, publishing the photos in his famed 1964 collection Tokyo.

Ushio Shinohara drew from the recognizable conventions of the genre while simultaneously combining these violent scenes with images of disaster from the Vietnam War culled from mass media, deconstructing form, and using fluorescent, flat swaths of color and garish patterns that aligned with Pop art sensibilities.

In 1969, Shinohara relocated to New York City, originally on a one-year scholarship from the John D Rockefeller III Fund.

Ushio Shinohara began his ongoing Motorcycle Sculptures series in 1972, a project in part inspired by the Hells Angels bikers he observed around downtown Manhattan.

Ushio Shinohara recalls having watched the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One while in Japan, and cites it as another source of inspiration.

In 1982, Ushio Shinohara held his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Japan Society Gallery with the encouragement of gallery director Rand Castile.

In 1991, Ushio Shinohara was invited to create a Boxing Painting in front of the public as part of the 1991 exhibition Japanese Anti-Art: Now and Then, held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, which became part of the museum's collection after its completion.

Ushio Shinohara was previously married to a woman in Japan, with whom he has two sons.

In 1982, Ushio Shinohara held his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Japan Society Gallery with the encouragement of gallery director Rand Castile.

In 1990, Ushio Shinohara's work was part of a traveling exhibition that was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ushio Shinohara's work is found in multiple public museum collections including: Museum of Modern Art 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.