Shinkichi Tajiri

Shinkichi Tajiri was born in Los Angeles in 1923 to Japanese immigrants who had settled in California. He grew up in Watts and later San Diego, where he became an apprentice to sculptor Donal Hord. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and his family were forcibly removed under Executive Order 9066 and sent to Santa Anita and Poston incarceration camps. At Poston he worked alongside the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and presented his first exhibition in 1943. That same year he volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and was wounded in Italy before serving in Special Services in France and Germany. After the war he joined his family in Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and co-founded the Gaka Art Guild, a cooperative of artists that organized exhibitions in the city. In 1948 he moved to Paris to study with Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger while also working independently among the circle of CoBrA artists. In 1951 he spent a period in Wuppertal, Germany, where he designed wallpaper patterns, before returning to Paris. There he met the Dutch sculptor Ferdi Jensen, who became his partner and collaborator, and in 1956 the two settled permanently in the Netherlands.

Tajiri developed a practice that moved across sculpture, film, photography, and design, using each medium to reflect on his experiences of war and displacement while exploring themes of power, memory, and survival. One of his earliest works, Father and Son, 1946, a limestone carving made in Chicago, was followed by paintings and plaster figures produced during his studies in Paris, where he began to move away from stone toward more open constructions in space. In 1949 he created scrap metal “one-day sculptures” along the Seine, photographed by Sabine Weiss, and soon after began his Junk series of assemblages. By the 1960s he was developing the Warriors and Machines, works that addressed militarism and technological aggression, including Made in USA from 1964. In 1967 he introduced the Knots, conceived as universal symbols of connection and recognition, forms intended to communicate across cultures without explanation. This series became his most enduring, with installations in public spaces from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Later projects included the Koan paper reliefs, a photographic survey of the Berlin Wall, and the Ronin sculptures based on samurai legend, each continuing his engagement with questions of violence, survival, and shared human experience.

His work was exhibited internationally and installed in public spaces around the world. A selection of his career highlights includes representing the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale and participating in Documenta II, Documenta III, and Documenta IV in Kassel. Major works entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Tate Modern in London, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Rijksmuseum, which acquired Made in USA for its permanent 20th-century collection. His Friendship Knot was unveiled in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and Queen Beatrix inaugurated De Wachters on the Maas bridge in Venlo. Among his awards were the William and Norma Copley Prize for sculpture, a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, and the Mainichi Prize at the Tokyo Biennale. He was later recognized as an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau, knighted in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and in 2011 was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his service with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. His centenary in 2023 was marked with retrospectives at the Bonnefanten Museum and Museum van Bommel van Dam. Tajiri passed away in 2009.