The 65th Mainichi Art Awards, announced by The Mainichi Newspapers on New Year's Day, went to five recipients including artist Shinro Ohtake. Ohtake was recognized for his first large-scale retrospective in 16 years, "Shinro Ohtake" (the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and others).
Born in 1955, Ohtake is one of contemporary Japan's leading artists, working across painting, printmaking, video, collage and more. The exhibition showed some 500 works from early pieces to recent ones and was highly praised as a show in which "all the works fused across time and space, and the exhibition as a whole became a microcosm condensing the accumulation of moments in Shinro Ohtake's life, his memories and emotions."
This blog introduced the exhibition in December 2022 while it was on view at the National Museum of Modern Art next door. We ran a photo of the odd sight of neon signs for "Uwajima Station" lined up on the museum's second-floor terrace, with the "The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo" lettered sign visible beyond. That, too, is a work; in a Mainichi interview Ohtake said, "The two sets of letters overlap and pull apart as my viewpoint moves. That is also collage."
The award ceremony is on February 8 at Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo.