tanaka macoto (Grand Prize)
nagarururu (A river flows)
With the state of emergency declared nationwide, the ordinary became the extraordinary.
Toilet paper disappeared from shop shelves and playgrounds in parks were roped off with signs telling us not to use them.
Nurseries were closed and I went for walks each day with my daughter by a local river.
In the river, things remained normal for the numerous living creatures.
During those two months when time stood still, the river continued to flow.
Hopefully flowing toward a better tomorrow.
Today, too, I walk by the river with my daughter.
Kohei Kyomori (Semi-Grand Prize)
HITONO AWARE
My painting shuttles back and forth across the borderless cultural sphere of the decorative arts, depicting diverse images of the body. My work questions our values for beauty that have become so uniform, discovering a profound admiration in what we once called aware (pathos) through the beauty of these bodies and their contrasts, from ancient Roman statues of Venue to para-athletes.
Naoko Oku (Semi-Grand Prize)
ceramic amusement
There are many kinds of living beings: those that can be seen inside the body, those that jump out of the wall, those that wear masks.
This is an omnibus of entertainment, play, distraction, and fun, all crammed into the ceramic.
Chihiro Hanayama (Astrid Klein Award)
Marine-degrading microorganisms
In order for a third party to sense the phenomenon of fungi or microorganisms’ influence on humankind, of the importance and necessity of such things that live in a microscopic world that is near yet far, I create art jewelry exploring, through items that we wear as jewelry, the theme of the values that exist in nature against a backdrop of the phenomena of the ever-changing natural world.
Chika Suzuki (Mitsuru Kuramoto Award)
Landscape of the Surface of the Earth
Color-coded specimens of sand collected from the city, coast, and various sites; fragments of things that originally formed a part of our lives, the plastic, glass, shells, metal, stones, pottery
A weathered, mineral-like something, mixed with the trash that has washed up on the shore; a modern-day fossil
Landscape of the ground surface, ever so faintly accumulating toward a stratum we can perhaps dub the Anthropocene, when human activities began to affect the planet geologically; traces of us
Hitsuji (Kaoru Sugano Award)
Live wire
A live line refers to an electrical wire through which electricity passes. I gave the artwork this name since it is a sculptural artwork that, by being made with electronic parts, functions not simply as an objet but as a circuit through which electricity passes, referencing both the meaning of the Japanese kanji character for “live” (ikiru) and the idea of “making alive” (ikeru) the flower that is the motif for the work.
Momoko Saito (MINA-TO Award)
WOODEN PLANTS
This work began from my interest in expressing plants through plants (and trees).
The macro becomes the micro depending on the object in question, while the reverse could also be true.
I aspire to express such relativity of perceiving the scale of one thing, and to induce a switch in perception.
Minori Manabe (WACOAL STUDYHALL KYOTO Award)
Melting Solitude
Solitude and solitude fit together and blend into one another, but become dirty if there are too many. I want the viewer to examine the solitude within him or herself, or within others, through the experience of actually “melting” solitude.
When so many examples of the word “solitude” are lined up, it looks really silly. At the least, it doesn’t look solitary. But then we probably don’t realize that the word “solitude” is right there next to us.
Hiromi Murao (Spiral Award)
Nation of love
Building on my previous piece, I am exhibiting a work likewise exploring the idea of clothing for people to mimic bird courtship. This time, the exhibit considers the background behind how humans came to mimic and makes this more apparent.
Yamato Honda (Audience Award)
Speech walk “kotonoha"
When you say something into the hole in this interactive installation, the spoken words are transformed into Japanese syllabic characters and then start to walk and move freely around the space.
The words walking around by themselves sometimes nestle like flowers, at others bare fangs like beasts, or even grow wings and fly away.