CHU ENOKI
Born in Kagawa Prefecture in 1944. Enoki moved to Kobe at the age of 16 to study design while working. From the age of 20, he began to paint in earnest, attending drawing classes in the city, and at his first solo exhibition, Seisei (Becoming) in 1968, he presented around 20 paintings that depicted, in a fantastical style, the eeriness and incomprehensibility of life that exists side by side with death. The following year, he founded the Western painting institute “0” with Western-style painter Rei Kamoi and others. Questioning the attitude of Japanese public exhibitions, he left the Niki Kobe (Niki-kai Hyogo Branch), to which he belonged.

He formed Group ZERO in 1970. Using the city of Kobe as an urban theater, they led a number of happenings that unfolded as a group. He also gave a series of solo performances, including “Naked Happening” (Ginza, Tokyo, etc.), in which he strut around in a loincloth with the symbol of the Expo burned into his body.

In 1977, he held a solo exhibition “EVERYDAY LIFE MULTI” at his home. He himself walked around town and on trains with half of his head, beard, and other body hair shaved off (i.e., half-cropped). In the same year, he decided embarked on “Going to Hungary ‘Han-gari’ [half-shaved].” In 1979, at the legendary Bar Rose Chu, a bar that appeared at the venue of his two-day solo exhibition, he dressed up as a bewitching female owner in fishnet tights and personally served drinks to the audience.

While continuing to create these seemingly inhumane happenings and performances, his mechanical sculptures and objects created from scrap iron and metal parts focus on the dangers and disturbing factors that lurk around us, from lethal weapons such as cannons, guns, and atomic bombs, to dioxin, and even garbage dumped into space. He has presented many super-scale works, some tens of meters in length and weighing tens of tons, and has always stunned audiences with his extraordinary imagination and creativity.

His recent installation of metallic parts painstakingly polished and piled up like building blocks has been highly acclaimed as a substantial work that incorporates Enoki’s accumulated thoughts and energy, which have been involved with “iron” in both his public and private life.

Legendary artist Chu Enoki’s sphere of activity has steadily begun to encroach on the art scene, with a large-scale solo exhibition at KPO Kirin Plaza in Osaka in 2006, a two-person show with Ushio Shinohara at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 2007, and an award at the “Roppongi Crossing 2007 : Pulse for the Future” exhibition at Mori Art Museum that same year.