Sophie Calle, Doris Salcedo, and Shigeru Ban Win Praemium Imperiales

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle has been named the winner of Japan’s 2024Praemium ImperialeAward for painting, while Colombian artist Doris Salcedo received the accolade for sculpture, and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban won the honor for architecture. The international prize has been awarded annually since 1989 by the Japan Art Association, which is under the patronage of Prince Hitachi, and additionally encompasses the fields of theater/film and music. Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee and Portuguese classical pianist Maria João Pires won theawardsin those respective categories. Each prize recipient is awarded ¥15 million (roughly $105,000). A grant of ¥5 million earmarked for young artists was awarded to Jakarta’s Komunitas Salihara Arts Center, Indonesia’s first private cultural complex.

Calle, whose work in photography, film, and text explores personal relationships, was lauded for her “almost voyeuristic documentation of other people’s lives and her interactions with them.” Among her notable works areThe Sleepers, 1979, for which she invited strangers to sleep in her bed, interviewing those who accepted;The Address Book, 1983, for which she contacted people listed in an address book she had found in an effort to create a portrait of its owner; andTake Care of Yourself, 2007, for which she solicited 107 women to interpret the last line of a breakup letter.

Salcedo drew praise for her sculptures and installations investigating themes of violence, loss, memory, and pain through such mundane objects as furniture and clothing. Much of her work is inspired by the five-decade-long civil conflict in Colombia and takes as its subject those affected by the war. Standout works by Salcedo include 2007’s Shibboleth, a crack in the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, and Fragmentos, 2018, a floor made from thirty-seven tons of melted weapons delivered by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia under the terms of the 2016 peace agreement.

Ban, who is widely known for his work with paper, was lauded for an emergency shelter he built from recycled cardboard tubes at a Rwandan refugee camp in 1995, and for temporary housing constructed for victims of Japan’s Hanshin-Awaji earthquake that same year. The architect, who founded Voluntary Architects’ Network to provide architectural relief to refugees and disaster victims, has also designed institutions including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in France (2010), the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado (2014), and Japan’s Toyota City Museum (2024).