The Japan Art Association and Lord Patten of Barnes, Praemium Imperiale’s International Advisor in the UK, have today announced the recipients of the 2024 Praemium Imperiale Awards.
Architecture: Shigeru BAN (67, Japan)
Painting: Sophie CALLE (70, France)
Theatre/Film: Ang LEE (69, Taiwan)
Music: Maria João PIRES (80, Portugal)
Sculpture: Doris SALCEDO (65, Colombia)
Each Laureate receives an honorarium of 15 million Yen (c. £73,000). The awards are given by the Japan Art Association under the honorary patronage of HIH Prince Hitachi, younger brother of the Emperor Emeritus of Japan.
Lord Patten remarked,
‘All five Laureates of the 2024 Praemium Imperiale awards have taken their land and people as inspiration to create works of profound poetry and impact. From Shigeru Ban and Doris Salcedo’s response to conflict and natural disaster to Ang Lee’s meditation on family and love, the Japan Art Association turns the spotlight on five hugely diverse artists whose humanity shines in times of uncertainty and turbulence.’
Winner of 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is renowned for his innovative work with timber, paper and bamboo structures. He is as celebrated for designing Centre Pompidou-Metz, Aspen Art Museum and Mt. Fuji World Heritage Centre as he is for establishing the NPO Voluntary Architects Network (VAN) in 1995. VAN and Shigeru Ban Architects have carried out disaster relief activities for nearly 30 years, providing temporary shelter, partition systems, community centres and spiritual places for victims of natural disasters and conflicts in countries including Rwanda, Syria, Turkey India, China, Italy, Haiti and Ban’s native Japan. Most recently, Ban supplied Paper Partition System for shelters for Ukrainian refugees inside Ukraine, neighbouring Poland and Slovakia as well as Germany and France. The system designed by Ban ensures privacy for inhabitants and has been used in numerous evacuations centres for major earthquakes in Japan as well as the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake. Currently, Shigeru Ban is involved in building a new surgical wing for the main hospital in Lviv, the largest in Ukraine, which is in urgent need of expansion in order to respond to the exponential increase of patients since the Russian invasion.
The 2024 edition of Praemium Imperiale welcomes the first ever laureates from Taiwan and Colombia. Twice winner of the Academy Award for Best Director (the first non-white director to receive the award), Ang Lee’s filmography encompasses Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Life of Pi (2012). From his early semi-biographical films about family conflict set in Taiwan, Lee has gone on to tackle subject matters as diverse as the Civil War, Watergate, comic book superheroes, the Iraq War and sci-fi action.
Born and based in Bogotá, Colombia, the sculptor and installation artist Doris Salcedo is celebrated for her powerful work based on the experience of victims of violence of the Colombian civil war between left-wing guerrillas (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC) and government forces and right-wing militia. Her landmark work Fragmentos (2018), commemorating the end of the Colombian civil war, is created from 37 tons of melted weapons abandoned by FARC fighters. Female victims of the war hammered the molten metal into fragments to create the work. In London, Salcedo’s renowned installation Shibboleth (2007), featuring cracks in the floor of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, expresses themes of slavery and racism stemming from colonial history.
In addition to the Praemium Imperiale Awards, the 5 million Yen (c. £25,000) Grants for Young Artists, selected this year by the Asian Nomination Committee, have been awarded to the Komunitas Salihara Arts Center, Indonesia’s first private cultural complex dedicated to promoting the visual arts, music, dance, theatre, literature and film. Founded in 1995 in Jakarta under the then military regime, the 3,800-square-meter Center includes a black box theatre, dance and music studios, an art gallery, a shop and a café. Komunitas Salihara Arts Center hosts more than 100 programmes annually – operating under the founding mission of upholding freedom of thought and expression, respecting diversity and nurturing artistic and intellectual resources.
Since 1989, the Praemium Imperiale Awards have been given annually in the categories of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music and Theatre/Film; covering fields of achievement not represented by the Nobel Prizes. The Laureates are selected from a list submitted by six International Advisors to the Japan Art Association. In order to maintain the Awards’ mandate to select candidates who have made a major international impact in their particular field, the International Advisors for the Awards and their committees are committed to looking beyond their own national boundaries for ground-breaking artists to recommend to the Japan Art Association.
Previous British winners include David Hockney, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, David Chipperfield, Judi Dench, Anthony Caro and Tony Cragg.
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