Shimabuku
Shimabuku initially wanted to be a poet, then a tourist guide. He graduated from Osaka College of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute, and developed an approach based on a deep and continuous empathy with his environment. Shimabuku’s first solo show was held at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. He has taken part in many group shows around the world. He made a standout contribution to the 2017 Venice Biennale with The Snow Monkeys of Texas: Do snow monkeys remember snow mountains?.
Shimabuku initially wanted to be a poet, then a tourist guide. He graduated from Osaka College of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute, and developed an approach based on a deep and continuous empathy with his environment. Since the 1990s, the artist has explored and travelled the world, listening to its rumblings and vibrations, which are reflected in his protean work. His installations, sculptures, drawings, writings, photographs, videos and performances, combined or produced separately, originate in encounters, stories and anecdotes relating to interactions with living things – people, animals, plants – and the mineral world. Unexpected, sometimes absurd, but always tinged with humour and poetry, his interventions create new situations characterised by simple actions and events based on great economy of means, which engage his participation or that of others, and are documented by the artist through text and image, either fixed or animated.