Shinro Ohtake

Shinro Ohtake (b. October 8, 1955) is a Japanese artist and illustrator from Tokyo, who graduated from Musashino Art University in 1980. Known as a founder of the legendary experimental/punk/cacophony musical unit JUKE / 19 in the 80s, he also formed a conceptual group Puzzle Punks with Yamatsuka Eye. He worked as an expressive painter and sculptor before relocating to London at the age of 22, where Ohtake met an old man obsessively collecting matchbooks and gluing them into pages of a notebook. The artist purchased this collection and began to create his own "street books" (intense travel scrapbooks built of found cultural artifacts: used tickets, tags, currency, newspapers and other mass-produced printed materials). Ohtake had exhibitions in Japan, Europe, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Turkey, and the United States. In 2010, he designed the public bathhouse and art facility Naoshima Bath "I♥湯" on the island of Naoshima.