Tatzu Nishi

Tatzu Nishi was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1960. After studying at Musashino Art University, he went to Germany in 1987 and studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Münster. In 1997, he began to produce large-scale projects mainly in public space. At present, he is based in both Berlin and Tokyo, and engages in artistic activity while going back and forth between the two cities. Even his name as an artist has frequently changed; besides his real name, he has used the names Taturo Atzu, Tatzu Nishi, Tazu Rous, Tatzu Oozu, Tatsurou Bashi, and Tazro Niscino. He is a rare artist with a diversity of faces whose constant displacements defy a “deja vu” familiarity.

Tatzu Nishi’s main exhibitions were as follows: Yokohama Triennale (2005), “Ecstasy” (2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), “Chéri in the sky” (2006, Ginza Maison Hermes, Tokyo), Kaldor Art Projects (2009, Sydney), Aichi Triennale (2010), and Manifesta 10 (2015, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg). His major projects in recent years were “The Merlion Hotel” (2011, Singapore), for which he built a hotel room containing the iconic Merlion statue as part of the Singapore Biennale 2011; “Hotel Ghent,” another hotel project incorporating the clock tower of the central station as part of the “TRACK” exhibition (2012, Ghent, Belgium); and “Discovering Columbus” (2012, New York), which transformed the space around the statue of Columbus in Manhattan into a living room. He has won international acclaim for his large-scale projects involving symbols of the country and/or city in question.

In spite of his continued creation of works that are not necessarily welcomed by the administrative authorities, he was selected for the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize in fiscal 2017.
Later in the same year, Nishi participated in the ambitious “Beppu Project” (in the city of Beppu, Japan), which consisted of four big outdoor installations and nine photos, and followed this in 2018 with “A Doll’s House,” an immense doll house that was installed at the entrance to the venue for the “Enfance” exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo (in Paris). Unveiled under the name “Amabouz Taturo,” this latter work evoked a huge reaction and solidified recognition of the artist under this sobriquet.