What is Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York ?
Speech at public reception, September 8
Reiko Tomii
Reiko Tomii
Tokyo is
Shinohara’s hometown, where he was born in 1932 and where he rose to notoriety
as an enfant terrible of the avant-garde scene. New York is his second and
present home, to which he migrated in 1969.
His art is
decisively avant-garde and what connects Tokyo and New York is The Avant-Garde
Road, the phrase which we borrowed from the title of his autobiography
published in 1968.
One word
that encapsulates his avant-garde spirit is Pop of Shinohara Pops!
Pop is the
punch he packs to create Boxing Painting,
his first key work that he invented in 1960 and revived in the 1990s.
Pop is
American Pop Art which he ironically critiqued with his Imitation Art series in the mid-60s, which include in this
exhibition Drink More (in the collection of Jasper Johns) and 10 Coca-Cola
Plans, modeled after Robert Rauschenberg.
Pop is the
zinger he brings into his Oiran
series which followed Imitation Art.
Oiran means a high-class courtesan, which Shinohara transformed into the
personification of Old Japan, inspired by ukiyo-e,
Japanese woodblock prints, which is a major popular culture in Japan.
Pop is
American popular cultures, which he first experienced in Tokyo under the
American occupation and then he avidly absorbed once he moved to New York. You
can feel the power and attraction of this Pop in his Motorcycle Sculpture, his first invention in New York.
When all
these Pops are rolled into one, we get Shinohara’s versatile drawings, which vividly
represent the cultural cocktail he has lived throughout his life.
Taken
together, the exhibition narrates a story of an inventive, imaginative, and
skillful image maker that is Ushio Shinohara.
