Letters to the Future: Ohtake Shinro

David Moscovich, meet Ohtake Shinro. Nice to meet you. I'm really fond of your cut-ups. Work. I'm fond of your prolific output.


That's about how it went with my historical meeting of Shinro Ohtake, the collage artist, who told me he started doing collage at the age of 21 (math tells me that's about thirty years of collage art), he recently had an art opening at The Fukuoka Art Museum, and I caught up with him at an afterparty at Tetra Artspace, quite coincidentally but for good reason. Not only is he a collage artist but also he plays in an improvisatory band called New Chanel, which he features in some of the collages. But don't mistake me, Ohtake's output is by no means limited to collage, and by no means limited to anything we can say about him. Beyond the found, collage, paste mish-mash everyday/travel inspired art, he used large wooden crosses plastered with photographs, spray-painted or arcyllicized. enormous vinyl shrinkwrap abstracts, emasculated Warholian screenprints, and he even designed and pepper spray-painted and cut-up an entire stage of musical equipment (complete with its own similarly pastiched control room) which he actually played with New Chanel on stage in downtown Osaka in the year 2000.

Nice to meet you, Ohtake. Hope to see you in the future present past.