Toshio Iwai CV
岩井俊雄プロフィール
岩井俊雄プロフィール
Toshio Iwai
Born in 1962. Since when he was a university student, Iwai became involved in experimental animation, film and video, while he was interested in the potential of flip books, zoetropes and other visual illusions of pre-cinema history. Then he shifted to art produced on computers, in 1985, his installation Time Stratum II won the grand prize at the 17th annual Modern Japanese Art Awards, as the youngest award-winner. His works were exhibited world-widely (at the Seville EXPO, the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon and the the Guggenheim Museum in New York etc.), also had been invited as a visiting artist at the San Francisco Exploratorium, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, and IAMAS. Iwai then subsequently became a pioneering new media artist whose wide-ranging output includes the TV show Ugo Ugo Ruga, the Bouncing Totoro exhibit at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, as well as computer game software. In 1997, he had a retrospective one-man exhibition at ICC in Tokyo, also had the performance in collaboration with SAKAMOTO Ryuichi. This performance went on to which the Golden Nica the Interactive Art Division at the 1997 Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Besides the works as the Nintendo DS game Electroplankton, and the Tenori-on electronic musical instrument made with Yamaha, he was evaluated as a children’s book author in 2006 by his bestselling series, The House with 100 Stories has sold 4 million. Recently, after solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art, Ibaraki and Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT], he held a large-scale solo exhibition as a comprehensive overview of his career (2024), including a collection of visual equipment at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, where he had participated in its very beginning days since 1990.岩井俊雄(いわいとしお)