Chinatown, New York
Shogo Shimizu
Patience Note III
LomexI met Shogo for ramen in Sugamo sometime in 2019. There was a pat of butter in the ramen, a specialty of Hokkaido, where he now lives. It was quite late and I was drunk. When leaving, I was surprised to learn that Shogo wasn't going home but was about to start the night shift at Family Mart. One of Shogo's drawings from this period details an erotic exchange of static electricity he experienced when giving change to a customer, which he characterized as being like the transmission of a secret code. For me, this is emblematic of what Shogo is able to do. Through his specific sensitivity, mundane experiences open up a world of psychological turmoil. Shogo's drawings operate as externalizations of this type of complex personal thought, using drawing as a tool of epistemic inquiry to propose provisional models for how internal forces might be organized. The drawings take various forms: simple diaristic text notes, belabored diagrammatic atlases of motifs, or even fashion illustrations that externalize internal emotional strife as garments. At other times, recursive ideas can be simplified down to textual logo mood-boarding or given precise masterful pictorial treatments. Mostly unified through his use of plain notepad paper, Shogo's drawings retain the immediacy of working marginalia, functioning as scaffolds for his thoughts. Shogo's adolescent-coded visual language reflects a condition of extended adolescence present in Japanese society that is now increasingly normalized across the West. The drawings chart emotional forces acting upon the self, pressures that accumulate and reorganize into visual systems that give form to anxieties, desires, and repressed inner thoughts. —Alex Mackin Dolan, 2026