Josh Smith was born in Okinawa, Japan in 1976 and moved to the United States. He studied at the Miami University in Ohio in 1994 and got a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1996. He started his solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 2003. Until 2020, he has successively held solo exhibitions in New York, London, Vienna, the Netherlands, Belgium, Melbourne, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, Norway, Switzerland and other places. His artworks have been selected by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and other public institutions.