Biography

Shinro Ohtake lived in London in the late 1970s at the height of the punk scene. He returned to Tokyo to form the pioneering noise outfit Juke/19 and embarked on a series of exhibitions that helped catalyze​ the contemporary art scene then emerging in the Japanese capital. One of the most influential figures in Japanese contemporary art, Ohtake intensified the cut-up aesthetic of London punk to a level of sensory overload. Collage, assemblage, oil painting, and a seemingly endless progression of dense, voluminous scrapbooks represent some of the aspects of his practice. Ohtake has also produced a succession of highly engaging installations, which the artist describes as self-portraits, that unify the various threads of his practice.