Ushio Shinohara

Around 1990, he returned to boxing-painting once more using a huge piece of paper and boxing gloves dipped into neon paint. This art was soon turned into a performance. He turned these performances into "battles" where he battles against other artists before a crowd, usually in New York.

In 1990, Ushio Shinohara's work was part of a traveling exhibition that was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Also, his boxing-painting and motorcycle sculptures were a part of an exhibition at MoMA from September through November 2005. Shinohara's work "Coca-Cola Plan" (1964) was included in "Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde" with ran from November 2012 until February 2013 at the MoMA in New York. 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 1982, the Japan Society in New York City hosted an exhibition of Shinohara's work, titled "Tokyo Bazooka". It was curator Alexandra Munroe's first project at the museum after having studied Japanese art through the mid-19th century and reportedly inspired her research into modern and contemporary Japanese artists practice, including the 1994 exhibition and catalogue "Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky".

Shinohara began his ongoing Motorcycle Sculptures series in 1972, a project in part inspired by the Hells Angels bikers he observed around downtown Manhattan. The artist was taken by the motorcyclists’ rugged machismo, their disregard for traffic lights and convention, and the violent energy they exuded—qualities he associated with a sort of American spirit not found in Japan at the time. Shinohara also recalls having watched the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One while in Japan, and cites it as another source of inspiration.

The works were primarily constructed out of cut cardboard boxes, assembled with adhesives such as packing tape and hot glue, and decorated with an array of materials including polyester resin, jelly beans, mosaic tiles made by the artist himself, wires, ice cream cones, and kanzashi hair ornaments. The forms of the motorcycles resemble customized choppers—Shinohara himself stated that he found Harley-Davidson bikes over Japanese counterparts such as Honda and Kawasaki, which he found to be “too modern.” 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 motorcycle, thus, was a symbol loaded with not only connotations of autonomy, mobility, and individualism, but also carried with it transnational socioeconomic connotations, especially considering Shinohara's status as a Japanese artist working in the United States.

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. The two met in 1973, when Ushio was a rising star in the New York art world, and she was a student at the Art Students League of New York. 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. Ushio Shinohara was previously married to a woman in Japan, with whom he has two sons.

In 1969, Shinohara relocated to New York City, originally on a one-year scholarship from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund. After a stint at the Hotel Chelsea, he moved to fellow artist Ay-O's loft in Chinatown, in a building occupied by several Fluxus artists including Nam June Paik. Charmed by the gritty energy of the city, the liberatory potential of working in the States, and the city's art scene, he secured a green card in 1970 and remained in the city, where he continues to live to work to this day.

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. 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 flourescent, flat swaths of color and garish patterns that aligned with Pop art sensibilities. Works from the series were featured in a solo exhibition, Doll Festival (Hinamatsuri), at Tokyo Gallery in February of 1966, one of the few commercial galleries focused on contemporary art at the time.

A 1961 photo by William Klein, of Shinohara creating a boxing painting performance is included in the collection at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 1960, Shinohara joined forces with several other artists who had been displaying artworks at the Yomiuri Indépendant, including Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, and Masunobu Yoshimura, to form the short lived artistic collective Neo-Dada Organizers. The Neo-Dada Organizers held three official exhibitions in 1960, as well as a number of bizarre "actions," "events," and "happenings" in which they sought to mock, deconstruct, and in many cases, physically destroy conventional forms of art. Examples included filling galleries with piles of garbage, smashing furniture to the beat of jazz music, and prancing the streets of Tokyo in various states of dress and undress. Using the human body as their medium of art, their violent performances reflected both their dissatisfaction with the restrictive environment of the Japanese art world at the time, as well as contemporary social developments, most notably the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.

Shinohara was instrumental in shaping the group's orientation around what Akasegawa would later term "creative destruction." In June 1960, at the height of the Anpo protests, Shinohara penned the short statement the group deemed its "manifesto," writing as follows:

At a Neo-Dada event in September 1960 titled Bizarre Assembly, Shinohara, wearing his trademark mohawk hairstyle, performed his now-famous "boxing painting," punching a large piece of paper with boxing gloves that had been dipped in ink. In 1961, renowned photographer William Klein captured Shinohara's "boxing painting" on film, publishing the photos in his famed 1964 collection Tokyo.

In 1955, Shinohara began submitting artworks to the raucous and non-ideological Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition and continued to participate in almost every iteration of the annual fair through 1963. 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."

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. His classmates included Tetsumi Kudо̄, Jirо̄ Takamatsu, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, who would become fellow members of the Neo-Dada Organizers. Dissatisfied with the school's teaching, Shinohara quit the school in 1957 without completing his degree.

Shinohara, similar to many action painting-oriented artists of the 1950s and 1960s, cared more for the gesture and vitality and less for the beauty of the image. As Julia Cassim observed in her 1993 review of Shinohara's retrospective at Tsukashin Hall in Amagasaki, Japan:

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. His bright, large 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).

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 doll-maker who studied at the Private Women's School of Fine Arts (present-day Joshibi University of Art and Design) in Tokyo.