Works
These are works created to date by our founder, Akihiko Shimoyama. Large-scale works and exhibitions by the foundation itself will be announced on the Programs page once they are decided.
8 April is Hanamatsuri, the flower festival celebrating the birth of the Buddha, and it is also Shimoyama’s birthday. Every year on this day, Shimoyama has presented work that rethinks life and death.
2026
An exhibition that captures visitors’ faces, voices and thoughts in doubles, sends these doubles into another world and lets visitors watch them converse from outside.
2025
Shimoyama makes a life-size sculpture of his own face and tests whether he can destroy it. If he cannot, he makes more and places them in various locations.
2024
A work in which Shimoyama stays for a day and a half in a dark room that no light can enter, talking throughout by voice alone with the people who bring him provisions.
2023
A work in which Shimoyama digs a hole next to a grave on his family’s mountain, gets into a cube-shaped box in which he can sit in zazen, and is buried in the earth from night until morning.
As an artist with the art collective ALT, Shimoyama has worked with local governments, international organizations and government ministries to turn the visions of communities into works of art.
2024
A ring of vermilion pillars at the entrance to the town of Nishikawa. Residents write their thoughts on it, and it will watch over the town for hundreds of years to come.
Akihiko Shimoyama, Ryo Kamiya In collaboration with Nishikawa Town, Yamagata Prefecture
2024
A work in which the faces of twelve people merge within acrylic spheres. Born of a collaboration between Japan and ASEAN, it was exhibited at the Expo.
Akihiko Shimoyama, Ryo Kamiya In collaboration with ASEAN-Japan
2023
A work created with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and presented to the Minister’s office. Bands of colour, built up in layers of pigment, shift gradually from top to bottom.
Akihiko Shimoyama, Ryo Kamiya In collaboration with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
See details of the works on the ALT website