Kenzi Shiokava's Late-Life Recognition Reaches Chicago

Kenzi Shiokava, the Los Angeles sculptor who worked in near-obscurity for five decades, has received his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Shiokava died in Los Angeles in 2021, shortly before his 83rd birthday. Raised in Brazil by shopkeeper parents who had immigrated from Japan, he followed a sister to Los Angeles at 25 and never left. In 1968 he entered the Chouinard Art Institute, earning a BFA, then an MFA from Otis.

He rented a studio near Watts, where the largest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights Era had erupted a few years prior, and became neighbors with a community of Black assemblage artists flourishing around the Watts Towers Arts Center. As one of the Center's resident artists, he showed in its gallery several times over the years, including a solo turn in 1994 — the highlight of a humble but deeply dedicated career on the margins of the Southern California art scene.

He earned his living as a gardener, working for Marlon Brando for 20 years. He eventually moved into a warehouse in Compton, where he slept, ate, and sculpted amid acres of collected materials, most of it chanced upon in streets and junk shops. He never married. He loved to dance.

Recognition came late. In 2016, Shiokava was featured in that year's Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum's biennial, which triggered a half-decade of late fame. International media coverage followed, along with invitations to exhibit near and far. The attention continues posthumously in the Chicago show.

The MCA presentation includes several distinct types of work. On the walls hang a handful of constructions assembled from dried leaves, old photographs, bits of glitter, and other found material. These are fine but nothing special. On a long shelf sit a dozen-plus old metal and wood boxes, most containing spare arrangements of toy figurines and plant matter. Laid out in an orderly, well-spaced fashion, they feel lonely — lacking the congenial density of an earlier show where Shiokava displayed them in a crowded stack. In his home, the boxes served as environmental companionship: they lined the walls, framed his sink, encased his toilet.

Also on view are a selection of personal photographs and gallery ephemera from across the years, a large array of the artist's traditional wood hand-carving tools, and an eight-minute video from 2017 documenting Shiokava in his studio, patiently gouging away at an enormous tree trunk with those same tools.

For viewers who have ever been enraptured by a piece of driftwood — its organic intricacy, its improbable whorls, its provenance — this exhibition will land. The 2017 video, which compresses that patient labor into eight minutes, makes the strongest case for the artist's singular devotion: Shiokava made his work, over five decades and largely without an audience, purely for the love of it.