-
Shinya AzumaTrade off, 2025Oil on canvas33.3 x 24.2 cm (13 ⅛ x 9 ½ in) -
-
-
In contemporary urban societies, the body is more than just a vessel for individual existence—it is a site where power structures, social norms, and cultural symbols collide. Subjected to workplace discipline, digital mediation, and the relentless cycles of capitalist production, the body is constantly being reshaped and compressed, forced to adapt, distort, and ultimately dissolve into a state of extreme absurdity.
Shinya Azuma employs a visual language of humor and surreal distortion to expose and reconstruct this experience of the urbanized body. His figures—otaku devotees, salarymen, and nocturnal drifters—navigate the peripheries of mainstream order, both as subjects of discipline and as potential agents of defiance. These grotesque yet comical figures resonate with the contemporary theoretical discourse of "the aesthetics of failure" and closely align with Byung-Chul Han’s analysis in The Burnout Society of the contemporary condition of self-exploitation.¹
¹ Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Stanford University Press, 2015. -
Shinya Azuma
Round 1 fight! (Submission), 2025Oil on canvas
181.8 x 227.3 cm (71 ⅝ x 89 ½ in) -
-
In Otaku with White Tiger, Azuma reexamines the dynamics between observer and observed, disrupting urban visual hierarchies much like Manet’s subversion of the gaze. The exaggerated characters in Snake Rain and Round 1 Fight! (Submission) assume positions of failure and absurdity as a form of implicit resistance to social norms.These visual strategies find strong parallels with Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, which advocates for alternative modes of existence that resist mainstream regulatory structures.² Through humorous exaggeration, Azuma renders failure not as defeat, but as a strategy for survival—a way of eluding the pressures of conformity.²Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 2011.
-
-
-
Shinya Azuma
Life-and-death swiming, 2024Oil on canvas
162 x 130 cm (63 ¾ x 51 ⅛ in) -
-
-
Resistance is not always overt or explicit; more often, it manifests in seemingly unconscious or absurd bodily gestures. In Azuma’s work, acts of stumbling, entanglement, and submersion are no longer accidental but are instead transformed into a potential means of defying societal norms.As André Lepecki argues in Exhausting Dance, bodily movement itself holds political potential,³ and Azuma’s figures exist in a constant state of imbalance—bending, twisting, and struggling—visually embodying the friction between individual agency and the pressures of social discipline.³ André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, Routledge, 2006.
-
-
-
At the same time, Azuma’s engagement with the body also echoes Claire Bishop’s theory of “participatory art” in Artificial Hells, where the boundary between spectator and participant is deliberately blurred.⁴
By employing humor and absurdity, Azuma encourages the viewer to step beyond passive observation and engage bodily in the absurd theater of urban survival. Here, humor is not merely entertainment—it is a means of self-examination, critique, and, perhaps, a way out.
⁴ Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, Verso, 2012. -
-
-
Potrait of Shinya Azuma. Photo: Mike Derez.
-
Subscribe Newsletter
Be the first to know about new exhibitions, artist updates, as well as books and more. Sign up for our newsletter below.