Ushio Shinohara - Japanese Neo-Dadaist artist in New York

In the late 1950s, Shinohara began submitting artworks to the raucous and non-ideological Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition. 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."
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:
No matter how much we fantasize about procreation in the year 1960, a single atomic explosion will casually solve everything for us, so Picasso’s fighting bulls no longer move us any more than the spray of blood from a run-over stray cat. As we enter the blood-soaked ring in this 20.6th century-a century which has trampled on sincere works of art-the only way to avoid being butchered is to become butchers ourselves.
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.
He currently lives Brooklyn New York with his artist wife Noriko Shinohara. Noriko Shinohara (born 1953 in Takaoka, Japan) is a Japanese-American multi-disciplinary fine artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her semi-autobiographical drawing and printmaking series "Cutie & Bullie". She has had several international gallery and museum exhibitions including in Tokyo, New York City, Dallas, Kraków, Ottawa and more.
Shinohara and her husband, Ushio, are the subjects of a documentary film by Zachary Heinzerling called Cutie and the Boxer (2013).