/ Shozo Shimamoto：ACROSS THE BORDERLANDS OF ART

For those of us who grow up in the east, we are unknowingly subjected to a global aesthetic that dominates our appreciation and understanding of beauty. In contrast with this universal mainstream, things familiar with navtives are often considered exotic. In modern times, as the world is re-mapping and borderlines are being redefined, will this era demand that we confront issues of global culture together for the next generation?
- Yaman Shao


A Samurai of colours, he reconfigured the crystallized symbols of beauty and the sacred, reinterpreting effigies of the Buddha, Psyche, Nike, and Venus through his painting, conveying a message of irenicism. The organic energy of the pictorial matter that erupts from the automatism of his calligraphic gesture is both a perceptive and an existential vitalism.
- Giuseppe Morra

For a long time I have been studying the work of Shozo Shimamoto, initiated first by my longtime friend, collector and art producer Diego Strazzer. I could work in the best conditions thanks to the remarkable archives of the Shozo Shimamoto Association in Naples, Italy, where Teresa and Giuseppe Morra conserve with an aesthetic passion and a scientific rigor so many treasures of works and documents to understand and appreciate at its right level the importance of Shozo Shimamotos’ legacy.
- Jérôme Neutres


When I say that art is astonishment, people react with surprise. We tend to think of art as something aesthetically beautiful, the fruit of delicate labour, but I would say that this is truer of craftwork. On the other hand, art, or the artistic gesture, consists in astounding the public. Obviously, "astounding" does not mean surprising by sudden and brash gestures.
- Shozo Shimamoto