More about Ushio Shinohara

Sr. Editor

Ushio Shinohara may be the most famous starving artist.


In Ushio Shinohara’s younger days he used his mohawk as a paintbrush.


He became friends with Andy Warhol after moving to New York, but unfortunately isn't as famous or successful. He and his wife struggle to make ends meet in a held-together-by-string apartment in Brooklyn.


Ushio’s career was tragically hindered due to his alcoholism. But in a strange twist of luck, his body developed an intolerance to booze, forcing him to give up the bottle. It looks like alcoholism runs in the family, as their 40-year-old son’s art career is at a standstill for similar reasons.


Shinohara and his wife Noriko are profiled in The Academy Award nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer. Cutie is Noriko’s semi-autobiographical cartoon character that deals with Bullie (Ushio) and his fairly childish artist lifestyle. It’s currently on Netflix and I highly recommend it!


They met when he was 41 and she was 19.


Seems like Noriko has an ‘I love you, but I don’t like you right now’ feeling towards Ushio.


At 80-years-old, Shinohara has the strength and vitality of a teenager but the true hero of this duo is Noriko who plays the part of dutiful and magnanimous wife and, if unhappily, put her career on hold to assist and build up her husband.


 

Featured Content

Here is what Wikipedia says about 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).

Check out the full Wikipedia article about Ushio Shinohara