Contemporary artist Shinro Ohtake was born on October 8, 1955, in Meguro, Tokyo.
He enrolled in the Oil Painting Department at Musashino Art University in 1974, but applied for a leave of absence after just one week. He then worked as a live-in employee on a ranch in Betsukai, Hokkaido, and traveled around the region, capturing the scenery in paintings and drawings. He continued this approach even after studying abroad in the UK in 1977, and upon returning to Japan, published a collection of his accumulated works. Meanwhile, after graduating from university in 1980, he formed the noise band "JUKE/19" and self-produced an album.
In 1982, Ohtake held a solo exhibition and fully launched his career as a contemporary artist. After stunning the world with a massive sculpture made from junk and trash, his work has expanded beyond art to include picture books, photography, performance, and other genres. His life's work is his "scrapbook," which he began making in 1977. This collection, a collection of prints scrapped by Ohtake at will, encompasses a wide variety of works, from fashion to art, landscapes, manga, and even erotic and grotesque material. Ohtake moved to Ehime Prefecture in 1988 and has since made the area his base of operations. In 1997, he participated in the "Art House Project," which transformed traditional houses scattered around Naoshima Town in Kagawa Prefecture into contemporary art. In 2009, he opened "I Love Yu," also on Naoshima, where he utilized painted tile techniques on everything from bathtubs to toilet bowls. He has since presented installations and other projects in the Seto Inland Sea region. Ohtake's work has also been popular in various exhibitions, but the most legendary of these is his 2006 retrospective, "Ohtake Shinro Panorama 1955-2006," held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. For this exhibition, Ohtake was the first Japanese artist to occupy three floors. Displaying 2,000 works, the exhibition attracted an astounding 55,000 fans during its run. At the Yokohama Triennale 2014, which began in August 2014, he is exhibiting a work that focuses on the concept of "forgetfulness," titled "The Art of Fahrenheit 451: At the Center of the World Is an Ocean of Forgetfulness," which is a reference to Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451.