It’s difficult to write about Shogo Shimizu’s work without entirely contradicting its tortured charm. Situated uniformly across the walls of No Gallery; rather, the 22 uniquely framed works find themselves perfectly contextualizing; enacting the circular sustaining process of ingestion and excretion that the drawings (Shimizu works almost exclusively on paper) picture. Exceedingly anxious, the work attracts beyond the artist’s obvious facility; capitalizing upon a collective voyeuristic fascination with the train-wreck of the perpetual teenage; i.e., punk; and the appeal of witnessing a violence only physically possible in the space of an imaginary.
Those unfamiliar with the Japanese language, or references particular to this culture, traditional and contemporary, nonetheless enter a familiar if uncomfortable psychic space via Shimizu’s evocation of the body, its fluid and flex vulnerability; and, the fashion in which it’s sheltered, confined, exposed and transformed. A Man Whose Mouth and Urethra Have Been Replaced and Whose Head, Bad Kidneys, and Penis Are Docked, Pissing in a Public Toilet; or, internalized violence and a cast shadow of the oppressively polite and cute as highly functioning - generative.
— Jeffrey Rosen
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