Ushio came to New york in 1959, the beneficiary of a generous grant. And he made an impression.
"He is a genius," says curator Alexandra Munroe, leaning into the noun. She's the Guggenheim Museum's senior curator of Asian art, and she's been a fan for decades.
"He is a maker of ideas; he is a maker of cultural revolutions," she says. "He never cared about making money. I think he was fashioning himself after a radical artist — fashioning himself after a heroic radical artist, after even a [Jackson] Pollock for that matter."
If he aspired to be a Pollock-style titan, Ushio Shinohara chose other American icons for his subjects — that motorcycle not least among them. Inspired by the image of Marlon Brando astride his bike, he scrounged the neighborhood for cardboard — ubiquitous on the New York City streets — and he started creating his versions, both smaller than life and, like the one on his roof, much larger.
He's never had a bike of his own, though.
"Never," he laughs, disclaiming any knowledge of how the machines work. "And my temper is an artist's temper, sometimes up, sometimes down. Very, very dangerous, on a cycle."
He exorcises that temperament in part by pounding on those canvases. The creation of his boxing paintings is a performance in itself: He wears swim goggles and boxing gloves, with paint-absorbing foam attached to them with rubber bands. Often shirtless — and still trim at age 81 — Ushio dips the boxing gloves into his paints and hammers at the canvas, working from right to left, as if he's writing kanji with his fists.
After 40 Years And More, A Relationship In Flux
The film also captures the couple's domestic life. Noriko brushes her long gray hair and plaits her two braids; they eat dinner, do their artwork.
And they bicker — over rent and bills, and the son who seems to be following his father down the path into alcoholism. (Though Ushio, the film notes, quit drinking a few years ago.)
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