ARTIST

Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010)

This is a lithograph with playing cards arranged around a circle with text below on a yellow sheet of paper.
The Degrees of Meaning ⓘ
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Shusaku Arakawa was a Japanese-born conceptual artist and architect known for his radical collaborations with poet Madeline Gins. Beginning his career in the 1960s, Arakawa was associated with the Neo-Dada and conceptual art movements, creating diagrammatic paintings and philosophical works that challenged perception and language. He and Gins later founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation and developed experimental architectural projects aimed at defying aging and death. Their structures, such as the Reversible Destiny Lofts in Tokyo, embodied a belief in the transformative power of space on the human body. Arakawa’s interdisciplinary legacy continues to influence art, architecture, and speculative design thinking.