Shinjiro Tanaka is a Tokyo based artist born in Los Angeles and raised in Tokyo. Working across murals, painting, installation, live painting, and video expression, his practice moves fluidly between multiple forms of media.

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After studying economics at Keio University and working at an advertising agency, the 2011 earthquake in Japan led him to reconsider the relationship between life and artistic expression. He later moved to New York, where he studied graphic design at Parsons School of Design while immersing himself in environments shaped by street dance, music, fashion, and diverse urban cultures.

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At the core of his practice is the idea of “Hazama” — a sense of existing between different worlds and states. His work explores experiences that resist fixed definitions: between Japan and abroad, body and city, order and impulse, isolation and connection. The bodily awareness and improvisational sensibility cultivated through dance appear throughout his works in the form of lines, layers, repetition, and spatial relationships.

In recent years, Tanaka has expanded his activities internationally across New York and Europe in addition to Japan.

 

In 2026, he participated in Springbeast Festival in Stockholm, one of Northern Europe’s largest graffiti and public art festivals, where he created large scale murals and engaged with an international community of artists.

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His recent series “Broken, yet still golden” focuses on the traces of value and dignity that remain within brokenness and division. Whether working in public or commercial spaces, his practice aims not simply to decorate environments, but to engage with the time, memory, and human presence embedded within a place, creating new forms of dialogue and perception.