Shinro Ohtake

Shinro Ohtake is recognized as one of Japan’s most innovative and prolific artists and has been making significant contributions to the contemporary art scene since the late 1970s. Receiving his BFA in 1980 from Musashino Art University, Tokyo, his multimedia practice includes oil painting, collage, artist books, large-scale assemblage, installation, and architectural works.

Ohtake grew up in 1950s and 1960s post-war Tokyo at a time when Japan’s economy was stabilizing and American cultural influence was growing. He moved to London in 1977 at the age of twenty-two, during the height of the punk scene. His time there was a defining period at the beginning of his career, setting him on a new path and reifying ideas he already subconsciously harbored: he cites a chance encounter at Portobello Market when he found a large handmade book of pasted matchbox labels as his first impetus for making scrapbooks. Ohtake discovered the ‘potential in pasting’, realizing at the same time that he had been working in collage from a young age. His sketchbooks became visual diaries filled with found material and artifacts as well as his drawings, notes, and photographs.

When Ohtake returned to Tokyo in 1978 he formed the experimental noise band JUKE/19, releasing four LPs before the band dissolved in 1982. That same year he had his breakout solo show at Gallery Watari in Tokyo, which showed the likes of Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys. With new-found local notoriety, he organized a series of exhibitions that helped catalyze the Japanese capital’s emerging art scene while continuing to create his ‘street books’, adapting a punk aesthetic and taking it to new extremes. These books are sculptural, voluminous, layered with mark-making, rich with texture and color. They vary in size and length, with some works exceeding 800 pages. They capture moments in time, collected and compiled in a way that they feel more like durational performance works rather than artist books. In 2013 Ohtake exhibited 66 of his scrapbooks, created between 1978 and 2012, at the 55th Venice Biennale.

While Ohtake’s original proposal is unrealized for HT22, he presents a limited-edition reproduction of his DIY-zine HAWAII BLUE, commissioned by Esquire Japan in 1999. The project is a 24-page, tabloid-sized zine with photographs and paintings Ohtake made on the subject of Hawaiʻi. In the 1999 edition of HAWAII BLUE, which appeared with an issue of Esquire, readers were encouraged to cut out pages from the Esquire magazine and add them to Ohtake’s zine, creating unique zine collaborations between readers and Ohtake that feature a mix of Japan and Hawai‘i imagery.