What is "Shinohara Pops!"?

What is Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York ?

Speech at public reception, September 8
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.