Shusaku Arakawa facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Shusaku Arakawa
Born	(1936-07-06)July 6, 1936 Nagoya, Japan
Died	May 19, 2010(2010-05-19) (aged 73) New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	Japanese
Alma mater	University of Tokyo (Mathematics and Medicine) Musashino Art University (Art)
Occupation	Artist/Architect
Known for	The Mechanism of Meaning Reversible Destiny
Movement	Neo-Dadaism, Conceptualism
Spouse(s)	Madeline Gins

Shūsaku Arakawa (荒川 修作, Arakawa Shūsaku, July 6, 1936 – May 19, 2010) was a Japanese conceptual artist and architect. He worked closely with writer and artist Madeline Gins for over 40 years. Together, they created many kinds of art. This included painting, printmaking, experimental filmmaking, performance art, and even designing buildings and landscapes.

Arakawa often put deep ideas into his art. He thought about how art works, how people see the world, and how we understand signs and symbols. These ideas came from famous thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Starting in the 1960s, Arakawa's art became very popular in the Western art world. His work was shown in famous galleries and museums. These included the Dwan Gallery, Gagosian, The National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arakawa and Gins started The Reversible Destiny Foundation. Here, they designed buildings meant to help people live longer. They also created the Architectural Body Research Foundation in 1987. This group brought together scientists and doctors to study life and death.

Arakawa often used only his last name, "Arakawa." This became common during his career in the United States and Europe.

Arakawa's Early Life

Shusaku Arakawa was born in Nagoya, Japan, on July 6, 1936. His family owned an udon noodle shop. Arakawa saw himself as an "outsider" and a "future abstractionist." He was interested in many subjects, like art, math, and medicine.

His interest in different fields started when he was a child. A doctor who lived nearby gave Arakawa advice about a medical career. The doctor's wife, who was an artist, told him to "draw." This helped him improve his drawing and painting skills. Arakawa briefly studied art at Musashino Art University.

Early Art Career (1950s – 1960s)

Arakawa's first artworks were shown in the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition in 1958. This was a big event for new Japanese art after World War II. Unlike traditional shows, it had no strict rules, awards, or judges.

In this exhibition, Arakawa created an art piece that criticized the 1945 atomic bombings. He used coffin-like boxes filled with cement lumps, fur, and hair. This was to show the violence people in Japan experienced. He used everyday items, called objets, to create art. This allowed him to share his message using things not usually seen in fine art.

In 1960, Arakawa joined an art group called Neo-Dada Organizers. This was during the Anpo protests against a treaty between the U.S. and Japan. The group created strange "events" and "happenings" that mixed visual art with performance. Art critics called their work "anti-art" or "savagely meaningless."

One of Arakawa's performances was called Site Made by the Viewer. He invited 400 people to an auditorium but would not let them in. When some people climbed a ladder to the balcony, Arakawa removed the ladder. This trapped them for over an hour. Arakawa said he didn't make art, but he "manipulated" his audience, turning them into "actors."

However, Arakawa was later asked to leave the Neo-Dada Organizers. They thought he was "too much of an aesthete" and caused too much chaos.

Paintings and Prints (1960s - 2010)

Arakawa moved to New York in 1961 with very little money. He called Marcel Duchamp, a famous artist, from the airport. They became close friends. Duchamp's ideas about art inspired Arakawa.

Arakawa started adding diagrams to his paintings. These diagrams were like philosophical puzzles. They made viewers think about how shapes are shown and how diagrams change what we see. He called them "diagrams of the mind." His paintings often had text mixed with charts, arrows, and scales. These works explored ideas from philosophy, physics, and the study of signs (semiotics).

These artworks had complex messages. They questioned what art is for and how it should be understood. For example, in Hard or Soft No. 3 (1969), numbers, letters, and arrows are spread out on a white canvas. The text at the bottom says: "These arrows indicate almost nothing/Re-arrange the numbers anyway you like." Paintings like this encouraged viewers to think about how language is built from simple visual parts like lines and shapes.

At an exhibition in 1997, art critic Roberta Smith said Arakawa's paintings were a link between older art movements and Conceptual art. She called them "philosophical or linguistic puzzles" that could be understood in many ways. Art experts also noticed that the blueprint-like look of his paintings hinted at his later architectural projects with Gins.

Arakawa was skilled in many printing techniques. He used silkscreen, lithography, embossing, etching, and aquatint.

Films (1960s - 1970s)

Arakawa and Gins also made experimental films. These films continued to explore the philosophical ideas from Arakawa's paintings. Even though it was a short part of his career, filmmaking allowed him to challenge how viewers understood what they saw. An example is his film Why Not: A Serenade of Eschatological Ecology (1969).

Another film, For Example (1971), shows a young boy walking through New York City. A narrator reads a text. The film's style was meant to show the ideas from Arakawa and Gins's big project, The Mechanism of Meaning. This project aimed to "deconstruct meaning and construct non-meaning."

The Mechanism of Meaning (1960s – 1980s)

Starting in 1963, Arakawa worked with Madeline Gins on a research project called The Mechanism of Meaning. They finished it by 1973. This project and their later building designs were a big part of their 1997 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. The book Arakawa + Gins: Reversible Destiny includes all of their work from The Mechanism of Meaning.

The project's panels show many ideas about what meaning is. They suggest that meaning is "holistic," meaning all parts are connected. Two versions of The Mechanism of Meaning have been made. Many panels combine different elements like collages.

Reversible Destiny Foundation (1980s – 2010)

Arakawa and Madeline Gins started the Reversible Destiny Foundation in 2010. This group uses architecture to try and extend human life. They wrote books together, like Reversible Destiny and Making Dying Illegal. They also designed and built homes and parks. Some famous ones are the Reversible Destiny Lofts-Mitaka and the Bioscleave House.

"The Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park" was designed in 1995. It's an "experience park" meant to change how visitors feel their bodies relate to the world. The park has no flat surfaces. Instead, Arakawa and Gins created hilly, bumpy areas. Visitors were encouraged to move around the park as if they were toddlers learning to walk.

The Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) (2000–2008) in New York shows Arakawa and Gins's ideas about life and death. The house looks uneven and wavy, with walls painted in many bright colors. Ceilings and doorways go in different directions and heights. Windows and light switches are placed at odd heights. The floors are made of hardened soil with bumps and slopes. Poles are in rooms to help people keep their balance.

Arakawa and Gins believed that homes should make people feel a bit unstable and uncomfortable. They thought being too comfortable made the body weaken. They believed that living in a home that makes you move and reorient yourself could help reverse aging. This is why the Bioscleave House has uneven floors and oddly placed windows.

"The Reversible Destiny Lofts - Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller)" were finished in Tokyo in 2005. Like Bioscleave, these lofts use "procedural architecture." This means the buildings are designed to keep the human body constantly interacting with its surroundings. This helps prevent age-related decline. The lofts are made of cube, sphere, and tube shapes, each with unique layouts. While Bioscleave was mainly a home, the Mitaka Lofts are used for many purposes. They are homes, educational centers, and cultural spaces. Parts of the site are often rented out, and it has even been featured on airbnb.

Later Life and Death

Arakawa passed away on May 19, 2010, after being in the hospital for a week. Madeline Gins did not share the exact cause of death. She said, "This mortality thing is bad news." She planned to work even harder to show that "aging can be outlawed."

Buildings Designed by Arakawa and Gins

• "Ubiquitous Site, Nagi's Ryoanji, Architectural Body (Nagi, Okayama, 1994 / Nagi Museum Of Contemporary Art)
• "The Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro (Yōrō, Gifu, 1995)
• "Reversible Destiny Office," in "The Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro" (Yōrō, Gifu, 1997)
• "Shidami Resource Recycling Model House (Nagoya, 2005)
• "The Reversible Destiny Lofts - Mitaka" (In Memory of Helen Keller) (Mitaka, Tokyo 2005)
• "Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) (Northwest Harbor, East Hampton, Long Island, NY, 2008)
• "Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator (NY, 2013: / Dover Street Market New York, Comme des Garçons)

Books by Arakawa and Gins

• Word Rain (Or a Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) (Gins, 1969)
• The Mechanism of Meaning (Arakawa & Gins, 1971)
• Intend (Gins, 1973)
• What the President Will Say and Do!! (Gins, 1984)
• To Not to Die (Gins, 1987)
• Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny (Arakawa & Gins, 1994)
• Hellen Keller or Arakawa (Gins, 1994)
• Reversible Destiny (Arakawa & Gins, 1997)
• Architectural Body (Arakawa & Gins, 2002)
• Making Dying Illegal (Arakawa & Gins, 2006)
• For Example (A Critique of Never) (Arakawa, 1974)

Exhibitions

Since the 1950s, Arakawa's art has been shown in over 400 exhibitions. These took place in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia.

Solo Exhibitions

• 1965: Peintures de Arakawa - Galerie Aujourd'hui, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium
• 1966: Arakawa - Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• 1970: Shusaku Arakawa, Japanese Pavillion - XXXV Venice Biennale, Italy
• 1974: Arakawa: Recent Prints - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
• 1979: Arakawa Prints - Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
• 1979: Arakawa: The Mechanism of Meaning - The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
• 1982: Arakawa, Matrix 72 - Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
• 1986: Arakawa: Paintings to Read - The Contemporary Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
• 1994: Arakawa: Drawings 1961 - 74 - Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
• 2006: Shusaku Arakawa: Print Works - Gifu Collection of Modern Arts, Gifu, Japan
• 2010: Funeral Bioengineering to Not to Die - Early Works by Arakawa Shusaku - The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

Group Exhibitions

• 1958: Tenth Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1959: Eleventh Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1960: Twelfth Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1961: Thirteenth Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1967: Drawing: Recent Acquisitions - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
• 1967: Pictures to Be Read, Poetry to Be Seen - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, USA
• 1968: Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture - Museum of Art Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• 1968: Documenta IV - Kassel, Germany
• 1970: Language IV - Dwan Gallery, New York, New York, USA
• 1976: The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America 1876 - 1976 - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA
• 1976: Thirty Years of American Printmaking - Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA
• 1977: Documenta VI - Kassel, Germany
• 1983: Twentieth Century Acquisitions - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
• 2009: The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860 - 1989 - Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
• 2019: American Masters 1940 - 1980 - National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

Arakawa and Gins Exhibitions

• 1990: Building Sensoriums 1973 - 1990 - Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA
• 1997: Reversible Destiny - Arakawa/Gins - Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
• 2004: Arakawa + Gins: Architecture Against Death - Nagoya University of Arts, Art & Design Center, Nagoya, Japan
• 2010: Arakawa + Gins: Reversible Destiny Projects - Kyoto Institute of Technology Museum and Archives, Kyoto, Japan
• 2018: Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient - Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University, New York

Retrospectives

• 2019: Arakawa: Diagrams for the Imagination - Gagosian, New York, USA

Awards and Recognition

Arakawa represented Japan at the XXXV Venice Biennale (1970). He also took part in the German art shows Documenta IV (1968) and Documenta VI (1977).

Arakawa received many awards and honors:

• 1986: Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, French Government
• 1987 - 1988: John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1988 - 1989: Belgian Critics' Prize
• 1997: College Art Association's Artist Award for Exhibition of the Year
• 1998: Highest award in the Rainbow Town Urban Design Competition
• 2003: Shijo Housho - Medal with Purple Ribbon
• 2003: Nihon Gendai Shinko Sho - Award for Innovation in Japanese Contemporary Art from Japan Arts Foundation
• 2010: The Order of the Rising Sun - Gold Rays with Rosette
• 2021: Google celebrated his 85th birthday with a Google Doodle.

Art Collections

Many of Arakawa's artworks are kept in famous museums around the world. These include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His art is also in private and company collections.