The inaugural Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize will go to Tokyo-based artist Gozo Yoshimasu, who will receive £200,000 (about $272,000), as well as exhibitions in London and New York as part of the prize.
Yoshimasu is better known as a poet who first emerged in the avant-garde scene of 1960s Tokyo. Over the course of his career, he has merged his poetry with various forms of art-making, including performance, photography, audio recordings, and moving image.
“My work has always moved between poetry, image and sound, so it means a great deal to have that recognised in this way. I’ve never thought of it as a fixed practice, it’s something that keeps evolving, shaped by places, people and time. This award feels like an encouragement to keep exploring,” Yoshimasu said in a statement.
His work has been included in the 2026 Shanghai Biennale and the 1991 and 2026 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, as well as the major surveys like “Poet Slash Artist” at Factory International as part of the 2021 Manchester International Festival and “Sharjapan: The Poetics of Space” (2018) at the Sharjah Art Foundation.
Solo exhibitions dedicated to the artist have primarily been in Japan, including at the
Maebashi City Museum of Literature in Gunma in 2023 and Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi in 2017. He was the subject of a retrospective, titled “The Voice Between : The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo,” at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 2016.
His London exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries’ North space will open in fall 2027, before traveling to the FLAG Art Foundation’s Chelsea space in spring 2028. Both exhibitions will mark the artist’s first major solo show in both Europe and the US, respectively.
In a joint statement, Serpentine CEO Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist said, “Yoshimasu, one of Japan’s most radical living poets, has spent six decades dissolving the boundaries between language, sound and visual art. At 87, he continues to push his practice into new territories. This partnership deepens Serpentine and The FLAG Art Foundation’s shared commitment to connecting artists with global audiences and fostering transatlantic dialogue
The inaugural prize was chosen by a five-person jury, including Obrist; FLAG Foundation director Jonathan Rider; Michelle Kuo, chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art; Venus Lau, director of Museum MACAN in Jakarta; and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. He was selected from a pool of 15 artists.
“Yoshimasu is a prolific and critically lauded Japanese poet, yet his artwork—his ‘visual poems’—has yet to be experienced in a more comprehensive way by audiences in New York and London,” Rider said in a statement. “By continuing to work with and complicate language, Yoshimasu is representative of a curious and ever-evolving artist reimagining new forms of communication well into his career.”
Last December, the New York–based FLAG Art Foundation announced that it would endow £1 million for the new prize, giving £200,000 to five artists every other year. The cash purse, the largest such award in the UK, is meant to provide the winning artist with “the freedom, time and material support to develop a substantial new body of work, exhibit it and then explore new ideas or directions in their practice,” according to a release.
In a statement, ARTnews Top 200 Collector and FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman said his intention for the prize was to create both a New York–London exchange and “to create unmatched opportunities for artists of any age, from anywhere around the world. At 87, Gozo Yoshimasu embodies the spirit and possibilities of this prize, and I’m excited for both FLAG’s and Serpentine’s audiences to have the opportunity to see the breadth and richness of Yoshimasu’s practice.”
