Ohtake is best known, however, for his many-layered “Scrapbooks” (1977– ). The books within this series overflow with torn, glued and painted odds and ends sifted from the artist’s random encounters with found objects—photos, packaging, ads, comics, posters, clippings, graphics, labels and more—that he has amassed for decades. During his residency with STPI, Ohtake mined that collection for materials to use in papermaking and paper-pulp painting. The latter, a process developed by STPI, involves mixing pigments into paper pulp, building up images with layers of colored pulp, then pressing them into a single piece of paper—a technique that echoes Ohtake’s own collaged compressions of ephemera.

The “Paper-Sight” exhibition is schizophrenic: half of Ohtake’s pieces involve graphics and buzzy neon color; the other half consists of monochrome abstractions that seem at first to be brushwork sumi-e—Japanese ink wash paintings—but are in fact lithographs and paper pulp paintings. These works depict Ohtake’s recollections of the wooded site where he exhibited at Documenta 13 in 2012, for which he erected a shed astir with pop-culture kitsch, personal mementos and accompanying sound, collectively entitled Mon Cherie: Self Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012). At STPI, Ohtake’s series of paper-pulp works, titled “Path” (2015), revisited the backdrop of Mon Cherie, depicting it as a claustrophobic, pulpy-black forest. In his lithographic series “Indigo Forest” (2015), Ohtake used dark-indigo toner powder to create the loose, textural “brushstrokes” of a bleak, half-glimpsed woodland.

By contrast, on the other side of the gallery, Ohtake introduces works in brisk neon palettes that incorporate multiple printing techniques. His fluorescent colors evoke radioactive luminescence, in reference to the nuclear meltdowns that devastated Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. The massive paper-pulp paintings, Pasture and Yellow Path 1 (both 2015), hang from floor to ceiling, each comprising two enormous sheets of paper in fizzy palettes of yellow, pink and crimson conceived as flashes of instantaneous irradiation. Pasture is one of the artist’s more overtly sardonic images: beyond a cute pink cow, an abstract entity—a mountain, cloud or radioactive steam—roils on the horizon. Nearby are Black Wall and Yellow Wall 1 (both 2015), which are large-scale paper works larded with unspecified vinyl LP records. In Yellow Wall 1, Ohtake entombs dozens of smartly aligned records within a pulpy morass of acid-yellow. Black Wall, meanwhile, is self-referential: its surface is embossed with exquisite record-shapes, and the chitinous rims of those records emerge from within the paper itself.

Shinro Ohtake’s “Paper – Sight” is on view at STPI, Singapore, until November 5, 2016.