Otake, Shinro

• 1955 Born on October 8 in Tokyo
• 1977 Lived in the UK
• 1980 Graduated from Musashino University of the Arts
• 1988 Moves to Uwajima
• 1989 Lives in the USA for three months as part of a program organized by the US News Agency and the Community of Artists Foundation.
• 1995 Lives in the city of Atlanta for two months at the invitation of the Olympic Committee to create the “Book of the Artist” ^[1]
• 2006 retrospective exhibition "Zen-Kei 1955-2006" at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art
• 2010 Project “I ♥ Yu”, a public bath in the village of Naoshima
• 2012 dOCUMENTA (13) , Kassel - participant in the main project
• 2013 Venice Biennale - participant in the main project ^[2]

Shinro Otake opened a new visual language for contemporary Japanese art, which in many ways refers to the images of media culture, underground music and the urban environment. His diverse designs include recordings, letters, music composed of noise and rumble, and several architectural compositions. Working with household materials: neon signs, posters, photographs and images from various publications, products, countries and eras, as well as with other discarded items, he organizes them in assemblies addressed to significant material and secular processes, which in turn affect how things are perceived, understood and remembered. The foundations of this approach were laid in his Scrapbooks series, which began back in 1977. Now this series already consists of 67 books filled with clippings from old comics, wrapping paper and other short-term printed matter, which he put together with cards, ticket spines, leaflets, CDs, newspaper clippings and photographs. Subsequently, he included all this in his graphics and painting, transforming books into sculptural objects ^[3] .

The artist’s first solo exhibition was held in Tokyo in the early 1980s, and in 1985 he was the first Japanese artist exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London . Since then, his retrospective exhibitions have been held in Tokyo , Fukuoka , and Hiroshima . In 2009, Shinro Otake created a functioning public bath in the village of Naoshima ^[4] , a kind of architectural project, thanks to which he expanded his practice of combining paintings, drawings with improvised materials into fascinating multi-layer compositions, expanding the creative experiment to the whole environment, working with the whole space .

Some of his most outstanding works were also presented in the main projects of the 13th Documents and the 55th Venice Biennale.

• Official site of the artist
• The interior of the bath in the village of Naoshima
• Project on the 13th Document
• Project at the 2013 Venice Biennale
• [one]
• [2]