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The Praemium Imperiale, a Japanese award that counts among the biggest arts prizes in the world, has this year gone to five people, including artists Sophie Calle and Doris Salcedo. Each winner will receive 15 million yen, or around $105,000.
Also among the winners are Ang Lee, director of films including The Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain; Shigeru Ban, an architect who has designed art institutions such as the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Aspen Art Museum; and Maria João Pires, a musician who ranks among the world’s top classical pianists.
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Calle, a French conceptual artist who will soon have a retrospective at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, is known for photography projects that have broached questions about the patriarchy and the act of seeing. She has also produced sparse installations; among her recent projects was one that filled the Musée Picasso in Paris, whose galleries she largely deinstalled of any artworks by the famed modernists.
Salcedo is a Colombian sculptor whose minimalist pieces have involved setting a pile of chairs in the space between two buildings, creating a crack that traversed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and producing a forest of trees within a gallery. Many of these works allude to forms of violence and the trauma that results.
This is the 35th year that the Praemium Imperiale has been awarded. The award is given out in five categories: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, and Film/Theater.
Past winners have included Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Ai Weiwei, James Turrell, Yayoi Kusama, and the late Rebecca Horn.
