Obayashi Foundation Research Program
This fiscal year the Foundation has launched an assisting program, “Visions of the City - Obayashi Foundation Research Program.” Based on the recommendations of our five-member selection committee, every two years an artist or a group of artists from Japan or abroad endowed with an abundance of free-ranging ideas and a strong interest in cities will be selected to examine and investigate various problems facing urban areas from a completely different perspective than that of conventional urban planning, and will then make suggestions or proposals for an innovative or ideal natures of cities, or a city that the artist would like to live in. There is no other such program that supports the activities of an artist in researching and exploring the theme of the city; in that sense, this is a unique experiment.
Since its founding in September 1998, the Foundation has not limited itself to urban engineering, urban planning, etc., but has supported experts who carry out research that contributes to urban development which will enable people to have richer and more fulfilling lives by targeting a wide range of areas related to cities and the people living in them, including the environment, the economy, history, and the arts.
Through this new support program system it is our hope that the vision of the city an artist proposes will provide new perspectives to experts active in a variety of other city-related fields and that urban studies in general will develop even further.
October 2017
Takeo Obayashi
Chairman of the Board
The Obayashi Foundation
The Selected
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2023 Ms.Minouk Lim
Minouk Lim (b. 1968) is an artist of many forms and has been creating works that are beyond the boundary of different genres and media, deepening the scope of questions while ncompassing writing, music, video, installation, and performance as her modes of artistic expression. Lim's practice recalls historic losses, ruptures, and repressed traumas. Rooted in language, and specifically, the politics of expression, her work does not replay past events, rather, they elevate the experiences, memories, and feelings through the means of imagining or engaging structural beings of non-human witnesses in her performative sculptural objects and installations.
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2021 exonemo
Freely and flexibly using anger and laughter and text editors, the artist duo exonemo works in a variety of media with a “hacking” sensibility. Artists Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa launched the project on the internet in 1996. Since 2000 they have expanded their activity to installations, live performances, event production, community organizing and more. Moving freely between digital and analog, the world of computer networks and the real world, they reveal the relationship between technology and its users. Their many experimental projects include humorous approaches and fresh perspectives. "The Road Movie" won the Golden Nica in the Net Vision category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2006. Since 2012 exonemo has organized DIPW and “Internet Yami-ichi (Black Market).” The artists have lived and worked in New York since 2015.
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2019 Mr.Theaster Gates
In 2017 the Obayashi Foundation launched a new grant program, “Visions of the City—Obayashi Foundation Research Program.” Based on the recommendations of our five-member selection committee1, every two years this program awards a research grant to an artist from Japan or abroad endowed with an abundance of creative ideas and a strong interest in cities. The selected artist is provided with an opportunity to examine and investigate various problems facing Japanese urban areas from a completely different perspective from that of conventional urban planning, and to make proposals for “a city that the artist would like to live in; an innovative or ideal urban modality.”
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2017 Mr.AIDA Makoto
Born 1965 in Niigata. In 1991 he graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts' Fine Art Department with a BFA and a MFA in oil painting. Moving freely to and fro between society and history, across the borders between contemporary and pre-modern, east and west with a body of work that includes pretty young girls, war paintings, and salarymen, Aida's distinctive style featuring bizarre contrasts and scathing critique has earned him a sizeable following among people of all ages. His works in such varied fields as painting, photography, film, sculpture, performance, installation, literature and manga have been exhibited widely both within Japan and abroad.