大竹伸朗

Ōtake Shinrō was born in Meguro-ku, Tokyo, in 1955. Two years later his family moved to Rokugō in Ōta-ku, a major industrial area, and lived there until 1963. His memories of congested factories going full bore amid Japan’s period of rapid economic growth shaped the foundations of his consciousness. Always fond of drawing, he aspired to be a manga artist. After the family moved again in 1965 to Yahara, Nerima-ku, he began to frequent the animation studio of Tezuka Osamu’s Mushi Production company, which was located in the same neighborhood, seeking advice about his drawings. He also showed a keen interest in music from an early age, influenced by his brother, eight years his senior, who enjoyed listening to American and Japanese pop. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, boys’ weekly manga magazines gained a great following, television was reaching a mass audience, and new Japanese songs increasingly took their cue from European and American pop music. Postwar urban culture and popular art (especially manga) and music would exert a marked influence on Ōtake’s future creative activities. In 1968, the teenager accompanied his mother to see the exhibition “Masterpieces of Rembrandt” at the Tokyo National Museum. This experience awakened in him an interest in oil painting, and he began to teach himself to paint. After making a failed bid in 1974 to enter Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts), he accepted a vacancy at Musashino Art University (Painting Department of the College of Art and Design). Immediately after enrolling, however, he obtained a leave of absence and went to Hokkaido. He lived and worked on a ranch in Betsukai for a year—hoping these labors would throw up experiences that would stimulate him as an artist, as he later explained. He temporarily withdrew from university again in 1977 to travel to London, where he stayed for about a year. He formed important friendships with Russell Mills, an artist about his own age who created collages, and with David Hockney. It was while browsing in the city’s flea markets that Ōtake found an outlet of his own: matchbox labels, which he collected and arranged in a scrapbook. Ever since then, he has been pasting pieces of printed matter, objects, and his own drawings into scrapbooks; they have multiplied over the years to constitute his signature series of works. His first London scrapbook heralded his distinctive method of combining the collage technique with “found objects,” or what he would call “collaborations with what is already there.” He has made it a practice to revisit the city every few years to seek fresh stimulation from its sights, sounds, and printed materials. Ōtake returned to Japan in 1978 and graduated from university two years later. He continued, meanwhile, creating collages and illustrations and entering them in open entry exhibitions. Around this time, he also formed the “noise music” band JUKE/19 and cut and released five albums as either LPs or EPs. At the end of 1982, his first solo art exhibition was held at the Galerie Watari in Tokyo. In 1984, the weekly “Asahi Journal” featured him in its popular series “Wakamonotachi no kamigami [Gods of the young]”—he was gaining recognition as a standard-bearer of the cultural “new wave.” In the context of art history, Ōtake was identified as a leading Japanese exponent of Neo-Expressionism, a new figurative trend among artists in different countries who used intense brushstrokes and colors in combination with images appropriated from various sources. In particular, the large-scale solo exhibition “Shinro Ohtake 1984–1987” held at the Sagacho Exhibit Space in Tokyo in 1987 attracted a great deal of attention. From this point on, he also became more actively involved in publishing books, writing essays, and giving interviews. Having married in 1986, he took up residence two years later in Uwajima City, Ehime Prefecture, where his wife was from, acquiring a derelict vessel from a shipyard as a “found object” and renting a warehouse for a studio. He participated in large-scale international exhibitions such as “Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties,” which toured the United States in 1989, and “A Cabinet of Signs: Contemporary Art from Post-modern Japan,” which toured Europe in 1991. More and more opportunities to exhibit overseas came his way. While busy holding solo shows at galleries and participating in group exhibitions, Ōtake also brought out the well-received picture book “Jari Ojisan [Uncle Jari]” (Tokyo: Fukuinkan Shoten, 1994) and formed Puzzle Punks (1995), a musical duo with Yamataka Eye (∈Y∋) of the rock band Boredoms. As other activities claimed more of his attention, his pictorial works tended to incorporate kitschy images of regional Japan. However, two exhibitions held in 1999, “ART/DOMESTIC Temperature of the Time” (Setagaya Art Museum) and “Ground Zero Japan” (Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito), served to revive his reputation in the contemporary art scene, later reinforced by the exhibition “Shinro Ohtake Zen-kei: Retrospective 1955–2006” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. This event in 2006 took up the museum’s entire exhibition space, one of the largest in Japan; encompassing more than 2,000 works, it overwhelmed visitors with its sheer scale and volume. Since then, particularly as part of Benesse Art Site Naoshima (an art project conducted by Benesse Holdings and the Fukutake Foundation), he has undertaken a succession of large commissions including the public bathhouse/artwork of 2009, “I ♥ 湯” (“I love ‘yu’ [hot baths]”), and regularly participated in international exhibitions, including the Gwangju Biennale (2010), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), and the Venice Biennale (2013). In 2022–23, “Shinro Ohtake,” his first large-scale solo showing in 16 years, toured the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Museum of Art, Ehime, and Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design. Employing a method of gathering and “pasting” miscellaneous materials within a rectangular format, Ōtake’s works are characterized by their very prodigality: large in scale, employing a multiplicity of items and a huge volume of materials, and incorporating sound, motorized movement, and light sources. The broad scope of his vigorous activities, ranging from essay collections and picture books to audio works released by music labels, can be considered another hallmark of the artist. Among his oeuvre, the following creations stand out: the scrapbook series in production since 1977; “Rubbish Men” (1987, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), a large work employing sound and a myriad of materials presented at the Sagacho Exhibit Space solo exhibition; “Dub-Hei & New Chanell” (1999, Fukutake Foundation), an “unmanned remote-controlled band” that turned its performance stage into a work of art; and his installation at dOCUMENTA (13), “MON CHERI: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed” (2012), which consisted of a hut fashioned out of an immense accumulation of diverse materials. (Nariai Hajime / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) (Published online: 2024-03-08)