French artist Sophie Calle among winners of 2024 Praemium Imperiale

French artist Sophie Calle and Portuguese classical pianist Maria João Pires have won Praemium Imperiale awards, Japan’s highest international art honours.

Two of Europe’s most celebrated artists have been recognised at the 35th annual celebration of the arts, the Praemium Imperiale awards.
French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and Portuguese classical pianist Maria João Pires are among the five artists across various disciplines selected as the winners of the 2024 prizes.
Calle won in Painting, while João Pires was celebrated in the Music category. Joining them are Columbian visual artist Doris Salcedo in Sculpture; Taiwanese director Ang Lee in Theatre/Film; and Japanese architect Shigeru ban in Architecture.
The Praemium Imperiale is an international art prize awarded by Japan’s Imperial family on behalf of the Japan Art Association. It was started by Hirohito, Emperor Shōwa, who reigned from 1926 to his death in 1989 and created the awards in honour of his younger brother Prince Takamatsu who died in 1987.
The annual awards are presented by Prince Hitachi, the President of the Japan Art Association in a ceremony at Meiji Kinenkan in Tokyo.
Previous winners of the prize include Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Norman Foster, Philip Glass, and Jean-Luc Godard, among many other high-profile names.
Each of this year’s laureates is awarded a gold medal and cash prize worth 15 million Japanese Yen (€96,000). An additional 5 million Yen (€32,000) has been awarded as part of a Grant for Young Artists, which went to the Komunitas Salihara Arts Center in Jakarta.
Founded in 1995, the Komunitas Salihara Arts Center is Indonesia’s first private cultural complex dedicated to promoting communal expression through a wide variety of artistic mediums.
Sophie Calle, the 70-year-old conceptual artist has previously represented France at the 2007 Venice Biennale and was awarded the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 2012.
Her work was introduced to the art world via the bold ‘The Sleepers’ in 1979 where she invited strangers to sleep in her bed before interviewing them for her follow up work ‘Venetian Suite’. Over her career, she has found new and inventive ways of sharing her life with her audience, pre-empting the removal of privacy that has become ubiquitous with the advent of social media.
For Music, 80-year-old singer Maria João Pires has won for her career-long devotion to engaging community and education into her practice. Alongside acclaimed international recitals, João Pires created the Belgais Centre for the Study of the Arts in Portugal in 1999 to develop choirs for children and adults from rural backgrounds. She followed this up with similar projects in Belgium, the Partitura choirs and workshops.
65-year-old Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has always kept the Colombian civil war at the heart of her work. From her devastating work ‘Shibboleth’ in which she created a crack in the floor at the London Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2007 to her 2018 work ‘Fragmentos’ which melted down the metal from 37 tons of weapons, she has created narratives around violence, memory, and pain through ordinary objects.
Shigeru Ban, the 67-year-old Japanese architect is celebrated this year for combined career of innovative public buildings (the Centre Pompidou-Metz, La seine musicale, and Swatch Omega) and his dedication to charitable work. Ban built shelters for Rwandan refugees and temporary houses for victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 before he founded the Voluntary Architects’ Network to provide relief for refugees and disaster victims around the world.
Finally, 69-year-old Taiwanese director Ang Lee is famous for his broad filmography that spans Asian cinema and Hollywood, from his international breakthrough Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to his queer Western drama Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi. Lee’s previous awards include the Oscar for Best Director and both Venice’s Golden Lion and Berlin’s Golden Bear.