Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1932. Shinohara entered the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts in 1952, and left the university in 1957. While still a student, he exhibited prolifically, including at the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition from 1955, and in 1960 formed the "Neo-Dada Organizers" with Masunobu Yoshimura, Genpei Akasegawa, Shusaku Arakawa and others, with Shinohara drafting the group's manifesto. He is one of the artists who embodied "Anti-Art" (Yoshiaki Tono), which symbolized the tendencies of Japanese contemporary art in the 1960s. After moving to the United States through the Asian Cultural Program of the JDR 3rd Fund, he has continued to work based in New York. Shinohara is known for an unconventional style that includes "Boxing Painting," in which the canvas is painted by punching it with paint-soaked boxing gloves; "Imitation Art," which boldly quotes works by Rauschenberg, Duchamp, Jasper Johns and others; and "Motorcycle Sculptures," in which scrap materials and cardboard splashed with paint are forcibly assembled into motorcycles. Thanks to his colorful personality, he is widely known by the affectionate nickname "Gyu-chan." In 2013 the documentary "Cutie and the Boxer," which closely followed Ushio and Noriko Shinohara as a couple, was released, and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards in 2014. His works are in many museum collections, including MoMA (NY), the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, the National Gallery Prague, The National Museum of Art, Osaka and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. His reputation in Japan and abroad has grown further in recent years: a solo exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz in 2012; "International Pop", which toured the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2015; "The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop" at Tate Modern, also in 2015; a solo exhibition at the Kariya City Art Museum in 2017; and, in 2021, participation in "Stop Painting," curated by the artist Peter Fischli, at Fondazione Prada (Venice).