Susumu Kamijo

Kamijo was born in 1975 in Nagano, Japan, and moved to the United States at age sixteen, attending high school in Salem, Oregon. He began college coursework in philosophy, anthropology, and writing before turning to studio art, earning a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Oregon in 2000 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Washington in 2002.

His poodle imagery, the motif most associated with his name, emerged around 2014 and quickly became his signature subject. Early solo exhibitions at Marvin Gardens in New York (including "I Think So," 2016) established the work, and a 2017 show and catalogue, "Poodles," at Sotheby's S|2 Gallery, broadened his visibility. Through the following years he showed at Jack Hanley Gallery and GNYP Gallery (Berlin), Stems Gallery (Brussels), and MAKI Gallery (Tokyo), before Perrotin began presenting solo exhibitions in Seoul, Paris, and Hong Kong, and Venus Over Manhattan began mounting recurring solo shows in New York, including "The Motherland" (2023) and "Fish & Flowers" (2025). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is represented by Marvin Gardens.

No verbatim assessment of Kamijo's work by a named critic in a major art publication could be confirmed in current sources, so none is reproduced here. His critical standing instead reads through his exhibition trajectory: a rapid succession of solo shows at internationally recognized galleries, including Perrotin's spaces in Paris, Seoul, and Hong Kong, and Venus Over Manhattan in New York. The recurring throughline in gallery texts is his use of a single, instantly recognizable subject, the poodle, rendered with a graphic, saturated palette that carries both a pop sensibility and a more personal reflection on identity and displacement following his move from Japan to the United States as a teenager.

Kamijo's auction record is "Marching to the Sun" (2020), which sold for HKD 2,142,000 (about USD 274,604) at a joint Phillips and Poly Auction sale in Hong Kong on 30 November 2023, a result Phillips identified as the artist's auction record. That result surpassed an earlier record of HKD 1,033,200 (about USD 132,456) for "Sunrise" (2018), sold at the same Hong Kong sale series on 29 November 2021, which had itself surpassed a USD 94,500 result for "Chasing" set at Phillips New York in June 2021. The rapid, stepwise climb from 2021 to 2023 reflects a market still forming: results are still driven by a small number of works crossing the block rather than a deep, continuous trading history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Kamijo, and authentication runs through his gallery relationships, principally Marvin Gardens, rather than a published scholarly record. His auction history is short and concentrated in the early 2020s, so headline results, including the current record for "Marching to the Sun," should be read as data points from a thin market rather than a smooth trend line. Museum collection holdings could not be confirmed from available sources; his institutional presence to date is documented through exhibitions rather than confirmed permanent acquisitions, and that distinction is worth tracking as his career develops.