Sho Shibuya, the self-taught Japanese artist known for prints & paintings in New York Times

Self-taught Japanese artist Sho Shibuya tells Home and Decor Singapore how every sunrise is a chance to capture beauty and start anew in his paintings that represent the zeitgeist of the current moment.

It all began in the early 5 days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when Sho Shibuya began to paint contemplative gradient colour fields representing the morning sky over the front page news of The New York Times as a remedy against anxiety-filled days and to record the passage of time.

Sho Shibuya New York Times

Although New York City was in lockdown, lives disrupted and the streets deserted, time didn’t stand still but pursued its relentless cyclical course with day turning into night, as if nothing had changed.

Viewing the outside world through the little window of his Brooklyn apartment, Sho had a eureka moment and decided to replace the tragic headlines of the daily newspaper that served as his canvas with the serenity and stillness of nature through his interpretations of the stunning sunrises each morning.

They made him feel connected to the city and a sense of community, as everyone shared a view of the same sky.

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Sho Shibuya Prints

“Every day, absorbing the bad news, I wondered how I could adapt to this new normal without feeling overwhelmed,” Sho recalls.

Feeling the need to appreciate and preserve the most mundane moments of everyday life, his paintings bore witness to the fact that even amidst chaos on earth,
we can find beauty and joy.

No matter what is going on in the world, the sky is always resplendent and the sun will still rise tomorrow. Depicting the constantly shifting colour palette of the sky spanning pale to deep blue, pink-violet and intense orange, and concealing the newspaper’s front page print beneath a layer of acrylic paint, his daily ritual went on to become the series Sunrise from a Small Window documenting his life.

“The most important thing is to capture the moment daily,” he says. “I believe continuity matters, and the meaning of the paintings relies on that continuity and seeing the works together over time.”

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Sho Shibuya Paintings

Until the death of George Floyd when Sho was overcome with emotion after reading the news, each one of his paintings had depicted the morning sky. One week later, he decided to paint a black rectangle over The New York Times cover with the title, “Black Lives Matter”.

While his sunrises in April 2020 began as small rectangles in the middle of the day’s headlines, by May, he made the choice for the first time to fill the entire front page on the 24th of that month under the heading, “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss”.

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Sho Shibuya Exhibition

He portrayed a sky progressing from dark blue to white over a long list of names of people who had passed away from the coronavirus spreading across the globe.

Gradually, whenever Sho was especially moved by a story – fires, floods, hurricanes, manmade disasters, wars, shootings, election results, natural phenomena, significant global events or more light-hearted subjects – his painting would mirror how he felt on that particular day in an abstract, prismatic reflection of his emotions.

“I visualise all the information in my painting, and when I capture it well, it becomes like a symbol of the event that creates the most solid visual language,” he explains.

Turning politics into art, he makes powerful statements without words, raising awareness and starting conversations, and his work has come to define the past few years.

Sho’s musings on climate change documented the European Union’s record- breaking wildfires on 26 August 2023 in sombre crimson red, while mass shootings illustrated by painted bullet holes are a recurrent subject.

On 20 March 2023, he paid a heartfelt tribute to the beloved “I Love NY” logo emblazoned on countless tourist souvenirs when New York City launched its new promotional emblem that was met with widespread criticism.

In partnership with Craig Costello, the graffiti artist known as Krink, they covered the 6 August, 2021 front page in black splashes and drips in commemoration of the 76th anniversary of the United States dropping the atomic bomb over Hiroshima during WWII, which killed tens of thousands of civilians in the immediate blast and many more in the ensuing radioactive black rain.

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Sho Shibuya Background

Born in Fukuoka City, Japan, in 1984, the artist from the land of the rising sun studied architecture and interior design at Aoyama Seizu vocational school in Tokyo.

When his friend introduced him to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, he taught himself how to use the software, producing posters and stickers for friends and family. Their enthusiasm for his creations convinced him to follow a path in graphic design.

“That was the first time in my life that I made people happy with something I created,” he discloses. “That feeling was the trigger to become a graphic designer.”

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Sho Shibuya Graphic Design

Upon graduation, he did a stint at an architectural firm, unable to find a job in design. Frustrated, he kept toiling away on his graphic design portfolio in his free time, and eventually found work sesigning magazines at a publishing company in Tokyo.

After launching his own agency at the age of 24 and building it into a successful business, he began to question his career goals and no longer saw a future for himself in Japan. Hearing of the opportunities in the US, he packed his bags and spent his life savings to move to New York City.

Arriving in the Big Apple from Tokyo in 2011 despite speaking little English and having few connections, Sho has called the city home ever since.

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Sho Shibuya Placeholder

As a graphic designer and founder of design studio Placeholder, he was behind products like the Biodegradable Bamboo Bag – a sustainable bamboo-fibre alternative to the common single-use plastic takeaway, which ties to the Japanese mottainai concept of avoiding waste, or that every object has purpose and meaning – and had brands such as Apple, Cartier, Revlon and the New York City Ballet as clients.

“My background is in graphic design, and becoming an artist was not planned,” Sho admits.

”I started painting in 2016 after feeling inspired by On Kawara’s Today series. I painted small pieces daily after work, which led to my first exhibition at a gallery in New York. Life as a designer was very satisfying, but after I began the Sunrise series on The New York Times covers, I felt I should dedicate my time to this. It creates more meaning in my life.”

He has since given up his graphic design career to focus solely on his art rather than to realise the vision of others. For him, the goal nonetheless remains unchanged: to visually communicate a message without having to explain it. The only difference now is that the client is himself.

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