Shortlist for Nissan Art Award 2020 Announced

On July 4, Nissan Motor Corporation announced the shortlist for the Nissan Art Award 2020. The five finalists are: Ishu Han, Sachiko Kazama, Ei Wada, Soichiro Mihara, and Nobuko Tsuchiya. The artists were chosen from 28 candidates in May. They will present new works at an exhibition to be held in Yokohama in July 2020. The Grand Prix winner will be announced at the show, and will receive a monetary prize of about USD 46,400, along with the opportunity to participate in an overseas artist residency. 

Chairing the adjudication panel is Fumio Nanjo, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Other jury members include Jean de Loisy, director of Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts; Ute Meta Bauer, founding director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore; Suhanya Raffel, director of Hong Kong’s M+; and Lawrence Rinder, director and chief curator of the Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

The judges noted the heterogeneity of the finalists’ practices and interests. “We have a wonderfully diverse group of artists this year, representing a wide range of media—from performance to woodcut to physical sculptures,” said Rinder. “They are five extremely strong artists, and it will be very exciting to see what they produce.” Among the shortlist’s three Tokyo-based artists, Han’s multimedia works revolve around issues of identity; woodblock printer Kazama investigates historical falsehoods; and Wada retools various forms of technology into musical instruments. Hailing from Kyoto is Mihara, who interconnects a variety of materials to create networks of objects. Tsuchiya, from Kanagawa, assembles found household objects into sculptural forms that embody narratives about memory, experience and the future.

The Nissan Art Award was established in 2013 to celebrate and promote emerging Japanese artists who have contributed significantly to developments in Japanese contemporary art. The award is sponsored by Nissan while the program and associated exhibition are led by Arts Initiative Tokyo. 

Evelyn Goh is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.

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