Shusaku Arakawa Biography
Shusaku Arakawa (1936 - 2010) was born in Nagoya, Japan and attended Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Famous for his paintings, drawings and prints, as well as his visionary architectural constructions, he was an early practitioner of the international conceptual art movement of the 1960s. After moving to New York from Japan in 1961, Arakawa produced schematic paintings, drawings, and other conceptual works that employed systems of words and signs to both highlight and investigate the mechanisms of human perception and knowledge.
In 1962, Arakawa met the American poet Madeline Gins, with whom he developed a personal and creative collaboration. Together they expanded Arakawa's painting practice in a major series entitled The Mechanism of Meaning and developed a theory of procedural architecture to further the impact of their philosophical implications on human life.
Arakawa's work is featured in institutional collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Center Georges Pompidou, Paris; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, as well as in numerous private and corporate collections. He represented Japan at the XXXV Venice Biennale (1970) and was included in Documenta IV (1968) and Documenta VI (1977). His work has also been the focus of major retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and has been exhibited widely in North America, Western Europe and Japan.
