Kenzi Shiokava (1938-2021) – a name that, in its very spelling, bears the traces of a history of diaspora and cultural confluence. The unusual transliteration of the Japanese sound into the Latin alphabet – recurrent among members of the first waves of Japanese migration – gives his signature a uniquely Brazilian accent. Added to this transcontinental connection is the United States, the country where the São Paulo artist, a descendant of immigrants from the Kagoshima Prefecture, chose to live and develop his professional and artistic career from 1964 until his death.

In Los Angeles, Kenzi Shiokava settled and trained academically at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) and the Otis Art Institute. In this context, he worked with artists such as John Outterbridge and Noah Purifoy, with whom he shared not only an interest in the language of assemblage, already an expressive trend in the local art scene, but also a sensibility about non-white racialized identities and a broader reflection on modes of creation shaped by intercultural experiences.

As a reflection of this multifaceted experience, we take as an example the totemic forms that the artist produced for much of his career. Carved mostly from logs or wooden poles and occasionally combined with straw, dried leaves, shells, and macramé threads, these pieces seem to evoke spirits from ancient times. Following aesthetic principles linked to the Zen Buddhist thought of Daisetsu Suzuki, Shiokava’s sculptures place themselves in space without appealing to grandiloquence or ornamentation. His works reveal a silent practice, fueled by decades of professional experience in gardening, which brought him closer to ikebana – a Japanese floral art that values minimal gesture and the revelation of natural beauty. Each cut, pigmentation, or combination of elements is carried out with economy and precision, deeply respecting the marks of the passage of time imprinted on the surface of the material and underlining its history and inherent strength.

In addition to the Zen influence, Shiokava incorporates animist visions from different spiritual traditions. The Kachina culture of the Hopi people, which recognizes a vital force present in all elements of nature, dialogues directly with Japanese Shintoism, in which the kami inhabit rivers, rocks, and trees. The spiritual dimension is the main thread running through the artist’s work. By bringing these matrices together in a non-hierarchical synthesis, Shiokava places his production in a zone of symbolic coexistence between multiple cosmologies.