Shimabuku

Since the early 1990s, Shimabuku has traveled extensively across Japan and internationally, creating performances and installations that explore the everyday lives, cultures, and communication methods of the people he encounters. His work spans a wide range of media, including sculpture, film, and photography.

Shimabuku's Art Style

Throughout his career, Shimabuku has explored the surreal and absurd as embedded layers in the everyday, creating a unique language that allows viewers to perceive and engage with their surroundings in new ways. Shimabuku's empathetic stance towards the arbitrary conditions in social and natural settings has led to a keen sensitivity in his site-specific artistic responses.

The recurring documentary and time-based elements in Shimabuku’s works create spaces where performativity and objecthood intersect, resulting in poetic and allegorical gestures and scenarios. His practice uncovers resonances that move beyond intellectual engagement, tapping into emotional and affective layers. In doing so, it challenges simplistic readings of the complex realities and forces of globalization and capitalism.

Shimabuku’s work disrupts conventional assumptions about social order, guiding us into an everyday rhythm that reimagines oddity, coincidence, improvisation, placemaking, and storytelling.

Exhibitions of Shimabuku's Works

Shimabuku has exhibited his work widely. Recent solo exhibitions include "Me, We" at MUSEION: Museum of modern and contemporary art in Bolzano (2023), "Moon, Potato, Swan and Sounds" at Galleria Zero… in Milan (2023), "Instrumental" at Wiels in Brussels (2022), "Swan Goes to the Sea / Let’s Make Cows Fly!" at Air de Paris in Romainville (Grand Paris) (2022), "Somethings Happen Twice: An Elephant Comes from the Sea" at Nagasaki Prefecrtural Art Museum in Nagasaki (2021), and many more.

Additionally, Shimabuku's Works have been featured in numerous group shows held at various galleries and museums worldwide, including CCBB – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Museo Orto Botanico, GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Turner Contemporary, Foundation Louis Vuitton, among others.