Sculptor Kenzi Shiokava transformed discarded wood into magnetic totems

LOS ANGELES >> Kenzi Shiokava, who died June 18 at the age of 82 from chronic conditions exacerbated by injuries related to a recent car accident, became a sculptor more by chance than intention. It was the early 1970s and he was completing his fourth year of undergraduate studies at the Chouinard Art Institute.

When he’d enrolled at the school, Shiokava had set his sights on becoming a painter. But a graduation requirement obligated him to complete a course in sculpture. The very idea filled him with doubt.

“Two weeks went by and I didn’t have a single idea of what to do,” Shiokava told the Los Angeles Times in a 2016 profile.

He ended up finding the answer in his own backyard. One day, as he tidied up the garden of his Highland Park home, he came across several pieces of wood he had accumulated, including an old railroad tie from the Angel’s Flight funicular in downtown Los Angeles.

“I started cleaning some of the wood and I realize: ‘That’s it! It’s wood!’” Shiokava recalled. “It has a history. It’s right there. I was so excited. Nothing else mattered.”

He transformed the tie, along with the other pieces of wood he had gathered, into a series of vertical, totemic figures that he displayed in Chouinard’s gallery in 1972. The exhibition drew the attention of L.A. gallerist Joan Ankrum, who gave the artist a solo show.

After that, Shiokava never looked back. In fact, it was work in the style of those early wooden totems, carefully sculpted from dead tree trunks and reclaimed telephone poles — pieces that felt more like spirits than objects — which drew the attention of a pair of curators affiliated with the Hammer Museum more than four decades later. Those curators, Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, ended up including a large selection of Shiokava’s work in the 2016 “Made in L.A.” biennial.

A collection of abstracted wooden totems — looking like spirits — rest on a broad, shallow museum plinth.

At 78 years of age, Shiokava became a breakout star of the show — profiled in international media and name checked in W magazine. It was an unlikely turn for the artist who, throughout his life, had operated at the margins of the Los Angeles art world and who had made his living not as an artist, but as a gardener. Among his clients was actor Marlon Brando, who counted one of Shiokava’s pieces in his personal art collection.

Shiokava, whose death was first announced on social media by the Japanese American National Museum and was confirmed to the L.A. Times by niece Xantipa Reed, was a radiant, personable figure, far more preoccupied with the process of creation than in glad-handing in the gallery circuit.

One of his favorite activities? Attending the live jazz performances at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and dancing with wild abandon.

“He was the kind of person who, up until his death, all he wanted to do was to be in his studio,” said Moshayedi, currently the Robert Soros curator at the Hammer. “The time he spent in the studio, it was a completely different temporality. Works would hang out there in various states of incompletion for decades ... and new objects would enter the studio and they may or may not become parts of works that were sitting in various states of dormancy.”

Even after the Hammer exhibition began to draw the attention of the media and museums and galleries, Shiokava remained committed to his vision.

“He had willfully decided after that attention to remain working in the way that he had established for himself,” Moshayedi said. “He was not going to get caught up in the speed and intensity of the contemporary art world.”

Before the Hammer exhibition, Shiokava had steadily shown his sculptures and assemblages in museums and in galleries around Southern California, including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Oceanside Museum of Art and Jack Tilton Gallery in Culver City. And while the occasional collector would materialize in his studio, broader commercial success proved elusive.

But the biennial catapulted him into institutional consciousness.

As part of the Hammer exhibition, he received the $25,000 Mohn Public Recognition Award. In 2018, he was included in a Pacific Standard Time exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum: “Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Sao Paulo.”

The following year, Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design staged a solo survey of his work.

A review of that show by critic Geoffrey Mak in Artforum described his work pieces as having “an almost spiritual function.” Indeed the show’s title was “Spiritual Material.” The assemblages, which included collections of dead leaves, Mak wrote, “allude to the passing of life; the artist might be the filter, gathering and reinfusing these objects with latent purpose.” As Times reviewer Leah Ollman wrote of the works in the show, “the continuity between matter and spirit can be viscerally felt when standing before these fellow vertical bodies rising from the earthly plane.”

The artist always expressed deep gratitude for the attention he received late in his career. As he told nonprofit KPCC radio in a 2016 interview: “Now I know my work is going to survive me.”

In addition to Reed, he is survived by three sisters: Lourdes Larkins, Miyoko Hilton, Lucia Teraishi, all based in Los Angeles, as well as a brother, Airton Shiokava, who lives in Brazil. Also among his surviving family members are his niece Hime Dequeiroz and a nephew, Glen Teraishi.