Shinohara was one of the more radical artists of Japan’s post-war era. He co-founded the Neo Dadaism Organizers Group, one of the most avant-garde collectives in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1960, in front of an audience including Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo, Shinohara sported a mohawk and stripped to the waist, cut his white t-shirt, wrapped his hands to form makeshift boxing gloves, dipped them in paint and went on to hit the paper on the studio walls.
Shinohara was a pioneer in performance boxing painting. Shinohara says he was in pursuit of “pure action”, an ephemeral art form that was a critical departure from Abstract Expressionism. Curator Reiko Tommi writes that “...this distinguished Shinohara from other artists like Jackson Pollock, George Mathieu and Gutai’s Shiraga Kazuo, who also used action to create paintings.”