Masaki Shinozaki

Japanese Artist, Picture Book Author, Sculptor, and Essayist.

One of my picture books, Father is the Sky, Mother is the Earth, was included in a Japanese junior high school textbook and has been adopted by many schools throughout Japan as supplementary reading material.

I have worked extensively in publishing, design, television commercials, theater, film, and music, including projects associated with the Tokyo International Film Festival and the Shiki Theatre Company.

As a sculptor, I created a five-meter outdoor public artwork commissioned through a project organized by Japan’s Ministry of Construction.

Among my major exhibitions was a large-scale exhibition in Osaka, jointly sponsored by Dai Nippon Printing, The Yomiuri Shimbun, and JR West.

For approximately two years I contributed essays to magazines and later received the highest award in a national essay competition organized by Japan’s Ministry of Education.

My awards include the Special Prize of the Liquitex Biennale, the Sculpture Grand Prize of the Arakawa Art Festival, and numerous other honors.

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Artist Statement

The impatience of turning eighty-one is always present within me. What brought it fully into view was the progression of glaucoma.

Today, weakened optic nerves cover my field of vision like countless fragments of ice crystals. A cerebrovascular disorder has also left one of my hands trembling. Yet I do not worry. Worry has never solved fate.

Around the time my eyesight began to fail, generative AI suddenly became available. I thought:

"Perhaps this could become a tool that compensates for what my eyes are losing."

I embraced it immediately. Yet the results could not reach the place I wanted to go. So I began combining AI-generated imagery with my own hand-drawn work in Photoshop.

Then, on November 9, 2025, something happened. A work suddenly appeared that matched my sensibility. I still remember that moment vividly.

It was a morning glory rendered in a sweet, sensual magenta. Yet beneath its beauty I sensed danger.

The image seemed to reject me.

"This is not a flower."

Perhaps I had never wanted to paint flowers that comfort people. Perhaps I wanted to create something that pierced the eye itself.

Perhaps I wanted to declare:

"I am still alive."

The fragile petals of that flower denied me with unexpected force. What continued to shake me was not irony, nor cynicism. It was a persistent sense of unease.

Looking back, it feels as though I was confronting the residue of eighty-one years that had never fully settled within me.

At that moment, I realized I no longer wanted to create flowers that could be comfortably consumed. I wanted to paint disturbance. I wanted to paint tension. I wanted to paint resistance.

Until the age of forty-three, I worked as a traditional metal craftsman. Then, without preparation and without any experience as a painter, I abruptly abandoned that profession and became an artist.

I expected failure. I was prepared to starve.

Instead, life betrayed me in a fortunate way. Awards followed. Exhibitions followed. And I was able to spend decades working as a painter.

I enjoyed that life. Yet something always felt incomplete.

After turning eighty, and as my eyesight continued to weaken, I began creating images that truly unsettled me.

This is not nostalgia. It is not affection for passing time.

I simply want to create work that pushes back against me. Work that refuses comfort. Work that resists.

Archive of Earlier Works (Approx. 500 Pieces)