Niigata Prefecture is a prefecture in the Chūbu region of Honshu of Japan. Niigata Prefecture has a population of 2,227,496 and is the fifth-largest prefecture of Japan by geographic area at 12,584.18 km2 (4,858.78 sq mi). Niigata Prefecture borders Toyama Prefecture and Nagano Prefecture to the southwest, Gunma Prefecture to the south, Fukushima Prefecture to the east, and Yamagata Prefecture to the northeast.
Somewhere is a multi-disciplinary UK-based creative organisation founded in 2001 by the artists and film-makers Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope.
Janet Laurence is an Australian artist, based in Sydney, who works in photography, sculpture, video and installation art. Her work is an expression of her concern about environment and ethics, her "ecological quest" as she produces art that allows the viewer to immerse themselves to strive for a deeper connection with the natural world. Her work has been included in major survey exhibitions, nationally and internationally and is regularly exhibited in Australia, Japan, Germany, Hong Kong and the UK. She has exhibited in galleries and outside in site-specific projects, often involving collaborations with architects, landscape architects and environmental scientists. Her work is held in all major Australian galleries as well as private collections in Australia and overseas.
Grizedale Arts is a contemporary arts residency and commissioning agency sited in Grizedale Forest in the central Lake District in rural Northern England. It conducts cultural projects locally, nationally and internationally from its bases at Lawson Park farm and the Coniston Institute. Its focus is on developing emerging artists and producing experimental yet accessible projects that demonstrate the purpose and function of art as an everyday aspect of a worthwhile and productive life. The organisation is financially supported by Arts Council England. Adam Sutherland, the director, guest-curated 'The Land We Live In, The Land We Left Behind' for Hauser & Wirth Somerset in 2018, a major historic and contemporary survey of rural cultures that attracted over 40,000 visitors to the galleries in Bruton.
Marco Casagrande is a Finnish architect, environmental artist, architectural theorist, former mercenary, writer and professor of architecture. He graduated from Helsinki University of Technology department of architecture (2001).
Tomoko Konoike (鴻池朋子) is a Japanese contemporary multimedia artist. She is best known for her large-scale installations and Nihonga-style surreal paintings.
Žilvinas Kempinas is a contemporary visual artist. He lives and works in New York City.
Kingsley Ng is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily on conceptual, site-specific and community-oriented projects. Ng crafts relationship between the work and its context through media and formats including interactive installation, public workshop, sound, spatial design and experiential design.
Firoz Mahmud is a Bangladeshi visual artist based in Japan. He was the first Bangladeshi fellow artist in research at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Mahmud's work has been exhibited at the following biennales: Sharjah Biennale, the first Bangkok Art Biennale], at the Dhaka Art Summit, Setouchi Triennale (BDP), the first Aichi Triennial], the Congo Biennale, the first Lahore Biennale], the Cairo Biennale, the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial], and the Asian Biennale.
The Setouchi International Art Triennale is a contemporary art festival held every three years on several islands in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan and the coastal cities of Takamatsu and Tamano. The festival was inaugurated in 2010 with the aim of revitalizing the Seto Inland Sea area, which has suffered from depopulation in recent years. The festival features over 150 artworks by artists from both Japan and overseas, many of whom make use of abandoned homes to host or even become their art installations. The Triennale lasts for eight months with three main sessions; the spring session runs from March to mid-April, the summer session runs from mid-July to early September, and the autumn session runs from October to early November.
Albert Yonathan Setyawan is an Indonesian contemporary ceramic artist, living in Japan.
James Jack is a contemporary artist based in Singapore.
Kyun-Chome (キュンチョメ) is a Japanese artist unit based in Tokyo, made up of Nabuchi and Honma Eri. They emerged as an art unit after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and rose to prominence after winning the 17th Taro Okamoto Art Award in 2014.
Naoyoshi Hikosaka is a Japanese artist and one of the founders of the activist group Bikyōtō. He was an artist-theorist who critiqued Mono-ha, worked in conceptualism in the first half of the 1970s, and turned to painting from the second half of the 1970s onward.
Naoki Ishikawa is a Japanese photographer, writer, and mountain climber. Ishikawa first established himself as an accomplished climber, reaching all seven summits by 2001 in his early twenties. In 2001, he began to take photographs seriously and thereafter his ventures as a photographer and writer have intimately linked to his travels and climbs, as he often photographs and writes about his own adventures to various remote landscapes. Ishikawa's analog photographs frequently capture nature at its most extreme and the people that inhabit it, gaining a broad recognition for his ethnographic sensibility and curiosity, informed by his study of antholopology and ethnography at Waseda University.
Yusuke Nakahara was a renowned Japanese art critic, curator, scholar, lecturer, university president, art festival organizer, and cultural administrator.
Sue Pedley is an Australian multi-media artist known for site-specific artworks in Australia and overseas. She has participated in residencies including the Bundanon Trust Creative Research Residency in 2016, the Tokyo Wonder Site in 2012, and the 2008 International Sculpture Symposium, Vietnam. Pedley works solo and in collaboration with other artists.
Tatsuo Kawaguchi is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist, whose practice often involves the use of objects and the investigation of materials. After studying painting at Tama Art University, Kawaguchi's diverse oeuvre has included drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. He also co-founded the Group "i", a Kobe-based artistic collective, in 1965.
Nobuho Nagasawa is a Japanese-born US-based transdisciplinary artist. Nagasawa is known for her site-specific installations involving in-depth research into the cultural history and memory, and extensive community participation. Her works were featured in international exhibitions including the Asian Art Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. She has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in Asia, Europe, and the North America. The venues include, the Royal Garden of the Prague Castle, Ludwig Museum (Hungary), Rufino Tamayo Museum (Mexico), Sharjah Art Museum, Alexandria Library (Egypt), among others. Recipient of the 1997 Design Excellence Award for Architecture and Public Art, through the Cultural Affairs Office in Los Angeles, Nagasawa has been commissioned more than 20 public art projects, including projects in California, Washington, Texas, New York, and Japan. Nagasawa was previously Professor at the Claremont Graduate University, Scrips College, California (1992–1996) and Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1996–2001), and has been Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook since 2001.
Yukihisa Isobe is a Japanese artist whose practice has been shaped by his professional interest for ethical ecology. Active and relatively successful as a young painter in the post-war avant-garde, Isobe appeared to abandon his artistic practice when he moved to New York in 1965 and began a career in urban and ecological planning. However, Isobe maintained his passion for the visual arts and began creating two-dimensional works again in the 1990s that now employed a graphic vocabulary of scientific signs and forms. Since its inaugural edition in 2000, Isobe has contributed monumental environmental installations to the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, notably Where has the river gone? in 2000, revealing to spectators man-made changes in the landscape.
