Gozo Yoshimasu has been announced as the recipient of the inaugural Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize, a new major international award that will provide £1 million in artist support over the next decade.
Presented by Serpentine and The FLAG Art Foundation, the biennial prize will award £200,000 to five artists over ten years, making it the UK’s largest contemporary art prize awarded to a single artist.
The recipient was selected by a jury including Michelle Kuo, Venus Lau, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jonathan Rider and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Born in Tokyo in 1939, Yoshimasu emerged from Japan’s interdisciplinary avant-garde scene during the 1960s and has spent more than six decades developing a practice that moves fluidly between poetry, performance, photography, audio recording and experimental moving image.
As part of the award, Yoshimasu will stage a solo exhibition at Serpentine North in autumn 2027, before the project travels in a reimagined form to The FLAG Art Foundation in New York in spring 2028. The exhibitions will mark the first major solo institutional presentation of his work in both Europe and the United States.
Known for dissolving the boundaries between language, image and sound, Yoshimasu’s practice includes what he describes as gozoCiné — an idiosyncratic form of moving-image poetry that combines handwritten text, film and spoken word into immersive visual environments.
“I’m truly honoured to receive the inaugural Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize and was delighted to learn I had been awarded it,”
Yoshimasu said.
“Upon receiving this great news, a line from one of my poems came to mind: ‘Although I am a shadow of a passenger on this planet my soul is always absorbed in play.’ I look forward to presenting the exhibition in both London and New York.”
The prize has been conceived as long-term support for artists at pivotal moments in their careers, providing space for experimentation and the development of ambitious new work outside conventional institutional pressures.
Bettina Korek and Hans Ulrich Obrist of Serpentine described Yoshimasu as
“one of Japan’s most radical living poets”, noting that at 87 he continues to push into new territories. This prize reflects our shared commitment to connecting artists with global audiences and fostering transatlantic dialogue.”
Glenn Fuhrman, founder of The FLAG Art Foundation, added that the award was created to
“build a bridge between New York and London” while supporting artists “of any age, from anywhere around the world.”
Jonathan Rider, Director of The FLAG Art Foundation, noted that while Yoshimasu is internationally recognised for his poetry, his wider visual and interdisciplinary practice remains less familiar to audiences in London and New York.
“By continuing to work with and complicate language, Yoshimasu is representative of a curious and ever-evolving artist reimagining new forms of communication well into his career,”
The forthcoming exhibitions will be accompanied by a dedicated publication and a collaborative live programme developed jointly by both institutions.
About the artist
Highlighting the multiplicity of language, Gozo Yoshimasu’s (b. 1939 in Tokyo, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo, Japan) poems traverse diverse geographic and discursive topoi and test the limits of translation. Written in his characteristic compact scrawl, Yoshimasu’s manuscripts often feature spontaneous applications of mark making, paint, collage elements and fragments from other texts, so as to function as both records of an originary performance and scores for future interpretation.
Yoshimasu’s work was recently featured in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo and the 15th Shanghai Biennale in 2026. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2016. In addition to solo exhibitions at the Maebashi City Museum of Literature, Gunma, Japan (2023) and the Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi, Japan (2017, which toured to the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Naha, Japan and the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan), Yoshimasu has participated in international group surveys including the Manchester International Festival, UK, Poet Slash Artist, co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lemin Sissay (2021); the Reborn Art Festival, Miyagi, Japan (2019); Sharjapan: The Poetics of Space, Sharjah Art Foundation, curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2018); and the 21st Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1991).
