MIYAJIMA Tatsuo (Japan)

Born in 1957. He completed the Oil Painting Course in 1984 and his postgraduate studies in 1986 at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Miyajima was invited to take part in the Aperto section of the 1988 Venice Biennale, where he won international acclaim. Miyajima has since held numerous exhibitions in Japan and overseas. From 1996 he has carried on the “Revive Time” Kaki Tree Project, which involves going around the world and, with local children, planting seedlings grown from the seeds of a persimmon tree that survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. He has been a professor at the International Research Center for the Arts of the Kyoto University of Art and Design since August 2003.

Jane ALEXANDER （South Africa）

Alexander earned a master's degree in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1988. Her work has been exhibited in Africa, Europe, Japan, Cuba, and the United States. She works primarily in sculpture and photography, combining images of sculpted works with photographs through photomontage, and is known for her life-size sculpted figures, particularly the Butcher Boys of 1986. Currently, She is an associate professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art , University of Cape Town.

CAI Guo-Qiang (China）

Cai was born in 1957 in China. He was trained from 1981 to 1985at the Shanghai Drama Institute, where he first began working with gunpowder. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings. His explosion projects aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them.

Ann HAMILTON （U.S.A）

Born in Lima, Ohio in 1956, Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. Known for large-scale ephemeral installations, her work has been widely exhibited in the U, S, and abroad. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 and was chosen to represent the United States at the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 2001 she joined the Department of Art at Ohio State University.

KCHO (Cuba)

Kcho was born in Isla de la Juventud, in the south of Cuba in 1970. In 1986 he moved to Havana to study at the National School of Art, where he graduated in 1990. Kcho’s central artistic theme is insularity and its symbols, which he depicts by drawing on the images of the sea, boats, and the houses of fishermen. In 1995 he received the Grand Prize at the Gwangju Bienniale in South Korea and the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts in Paris, France.

LEE Ufan (Korea)

Born in South Korea in 1936, Lee came to Japan after leaving Seoul National University in 1956 and
graduated from the Nihon University College of Humanities in 1961. Around 1970 he came under the spotlight for leading the Mono-ha movement, which incorporated externality-such as substances and space-in artistic expression. Lee has appeared in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1971 Paris Biennale and the 1977 Kassel Documenta. He won the thirteenth Praemium Imperiale in 2001.

Thomas STRUTH (Germany)

Born in 1954 in Germany,.he studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf between 1973 and 1980 with Gerhard Richter and Bernd Becher. He started out with painting and drawing but switched to photography in 1976. From 1993 to 1996 Struth was a professor for photography at Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, and in 1997 he won the “Spectrum” Photography Prize. Major projects include “Unconscious Places, ” “Family Portraits,” “Museum Photographs,” and “Paradise.”

TSUBAKI Noboru (Japan)

Born in 1953, Tsubaki stole the show at the 1989 “Against Nature” exhibition. In Yokohama Triennale 2001 he jointly created “Locust” with Hisashi Muroi. In 2003 his“UN Boy” exhibition at Art Tower Mito questioned the relationship between the individual and the system. He is now carrying out the Radical Dialogue Project in Bangladesh, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Tsubaki became a professor of the Kyoto University of Art and Design in April 2005 and is a visiting researcher at the Center for Global Environmental Research.