A founding member of the short-lived, avant-garde collective Neo-Dada Organizers, Shinohara spent the early years of his life in Tokyo before moving to New York City in 1969, where he continues to live and work.
His energetic confrontations with conventions of both traditional and contemporary artistic canons are filtered through a pop sensibility and an understanding of art-making as a series of ephemeral gestures rather than a results-based process.
[10] Shinohara was keenly conscious of his public image and sought to craft a persona through media portrayals, persuading the Weekly Sankei to feature him as a (self-dubbed) "rockabilly painter".
[11]: 12 In March 1958, Shinohara paid a visit to Masunobu Yoshimura's newly built studio-residence in Shinjuku, an open plan space with large glass doors and white mortar finish designed by Arata Isozaki.
The Neo-Dada Organizers held three official exhibitions in 1960, as well as a number of bizarre "actions," "events," and "happenings" in which they sought to mock, deconstruct, and in many cases, physically destroy conventional forms of art.
[13] Examples included filling galleries with piles of garbage, smashing furniture to the beat of jazz music, and prancing the streets of Tokyo in various states of dress and undress.
"[15] In June 1960, at the height of the Anpo protests, Shinohara penned the short statement the group deemed its "manifesto," writing as follows: No matter how much we fantasize about procreation in the year 1960, a single atomic explosion will casually solve everything for us, so Picasso’s fighting bulls no longer move us any more than the spray of blood from a run-over stray cat.
[15]Driven by a heedless energy to resist, provoke, indulge, and produce scandal and awe, the Neo-Dada Organizers were not rooted in the theoretical or political so much as the intuitive and instinctual dimensions of making and exhibiting art.
[12]: 58 Shinohara's works as part of the collective, such as Cheerful Fourth Dimension (Gokigenna 4-jigen) and Thunder Sculpture (Kaminari chokoku), used massive amounts of store-bought balloons, bamboo poles, nails, and other generic materials to produce destructive performances that indulged in the pleasures of excess and spectacle.
[12]: 61 Shinohara was also keenly aware of the artistic value of self-promotion and immediacy in the age of mass media, and walked around the streets of Ginza with exhibition announcements plastered across his body, in an act that blurred the division between performance and publicity.
The title refers to the high-ranking courtesans from the Edo period, and the works were particularly informed by the famed muzan-e ("atrocity prints") series Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse (1866–7) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
[7]: 14 Shinohara drew from the recognizable conventions of the genre while simultaneously combining these violent scenes with images of disaster from the Vietnam War culled from mass media, deconstructing form, and using fluorescent, flat swaths of color and garish patterns that aligned with Pop art sensibilities.
For the installation, Shinohara created life-size hina dolls out of aluminum, adorning the empress figure with several gaudy kanzashi to conflate her identity with an oiran, and transforming the emperor into an unsettling machine, whose head would spin rapidly and emit loud noise when a switch was turned on.
[20] In 1965, Johns used the work as a basis for a flag painting rendered in bright orange and green, maintaining the cycle of imitation and re-appropriation that formed the conceptual bedrock of Pop.
[22] The works were primarily constructed out of found cardboard boxes, assembled with adhesives such as packing tape and hot glue, and decorated with an array of materials including polyester resin, jelly beans, mosaic tiles made by the artist himself, wires, ice cream cones, and kanzashi hair ornaments.
[17]: 32 Though Shinohara's style is known for its rugged energy and vibrant, seemingly chaotic gestures, critics have often remarked on his keen interest in pictorial references and attention to formal organization.