By Rachel Youens
On Wednesday, May 24 at 7 p.m. sharp, two Japanese artists will compete in an unusual street fight involving paints, boxing gloves, and dance outside Ethan Cohen Fine Art Gallery at 18 Jay St. in Tribeca. Called “Action Painting Street Battle,” this public performance will pit 75-year-old Ushio Shinohara and 26-year-old Ryoga Katsuma against each other in a half-hour boxing match, during which each artist will paint a large canvas — Shinohara with his signature boxing gloves and Katsuma using his hands and brushes. Five judges will determine the winner in several categories from expression and originality to energy and creativity. Because this public performance will affect Jay St.’s stores, traffic, shipping and other commercial activities, curator and gallery director Shinya Watanabe worked with the NYPD to acquire community board approval for the event.
The 26- year-old curator has wanted to sponsor this match for the past two years. The catalyst came at a party in Chelsea three years ago, when he met Ryoga Katsuma, a self-taught Japanese artist who had recently immigrated to the states. Over time, Watanabe began to recognize similarities between Katsuma’s style of art and Ushio Shinohara’s, a Neo-Dadaist who is legendary in Japan for his action painting. Though he’d never met Shinohara, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1969 and is currently living in Dumbo, Brooklyn, Watanabe decided to introduce the two in 2004. When he brought Katsuma to Shinohara’s studio in Dumbo, the older avant-gardist “acted like a king,” said Watanabe. It was then that he realized the two would be perfectly suited for an action painting match. Shinohara would be the virtuosic performer and the heavy hitter of the show, while Katsuma would be the challenger. After becoming gallery director at Ethan Cohen nine months ago, Watanabe saw an opportunity to formally curate the performance this year as part of New York’s Asian Contemporary Art Week, hosted by the Asia Society of New York.
Critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term ‘action painting’ in 1952. It encapsulated the most recent developments of Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who used non-figurative means such as drips and splashes to become involved in painting “as a temporal and spatial arena on which to imprint the process of its making.” His term was taken up by later performance artists, like French painter Yves Klein, who used people as tools, dipping their bodies into paint and pressing them onto the canvas.
Shinohara pushed the genre further. As a student at the Tokyo National University post- WWII, Shinohara mastered the traditional art forms. Upon his graduation, however, he became involved in the avant-garde scene, and in 1959, inspired by a self-portrait by Ukioye artist Hokusai, he initiated the genre of ‘Boxing Painting.’ Taking on the spatial and temporal aspects of ‘action painting,’ Shinohara donned boxing gloves and ritualistically chanted to produce tactile-aural sensations while he worked in ‘space-time.’ Shinohara wore monk’s clothing and shaved his head – inventing what might have been the first Mohawk. Working calligraphically in black ink, and applying the ink with boxing gloves, the painting became so abstract that his face was hidden, located somewhere in the center. His performance resulted in the expansively pictorial work titled “The Largest Self-Portrait in the World.” He has since performed in cities all over the world.
Shinohara’s challenger Ryoga Katsuma, born on remote Katashima Island, Kochi in 1979, began making art after migrating to Tokyo in the late 1990’s. Homeless, he began selling pen drawings to earn food money on the streets. While working at a factory job, Katsuma’s aspiration to become a “professional painter” became an ambition. He began his own action painting shows in cities of Osaka and Nagoya. Although Ryoga followed in Shinohara’s footsteps, he was formally unschooled and seemed unaware of his predecessor’s achievements. After moving to New York in 2002, he performed at several venues including PS 1 and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center. Music is also important to Katsuma, and in 2003 at b.p.m., a club in Brooklyn, he collaborated with experimental drummer Tim Barnes. While Katsuma spontaneously painted on a large canvas, eventually extending his paint from the energetic surface of his canvas to his own body, he moved and danced to the random and chance-like rhythms of his collaborator.
When asked what inspired his first action painting, Katsuma replied “All the human beings have a negative part of their own life. At first, I was afraid to show this negative aspect of human being to other people, but the audience likes it. The inspiration of action painting is insaneness. All the people [have] this insaneness, and I am one of the rare person who can show it to them.” This quote evokes an attitude about painting and its extension into space that is more therapeutic than Shinohara’s avant-garde philosophy. Katsuma’s personal painting style has affinities to outsider art and art brut. He wants his painting to be childlike and free, and chooses a favorite color and theme “to encounter the kinds of infinite ideas that only innocent children are capable.”
Watanabe’s choice of Shinohara and his compatriot-challenger Katsuma, each transplanted from Japan to the United States, implies the strength of Japan’s aesthetic voice and of our inclusion of a more broadly diverse art world. Upon the completion of the match, which will be accompanied by the punk rock drumming of Hari Ganglberger, the paintings will be exhibited inside the gallery, alongside a selection of documentary photographs by Minoru Hirata. They are part of the “Art Archeology Project,” an archive that is being co-organized by Ethan Cohen gallery and Reiko Tomii of early performances by Shinohara and other Japanese performance artists like Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik from the 1960’s.
The show runs through June 24. For more information, visit www.ecfa.org or call 212.625.1250.
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