Gozo Yoshimasu Wins £200,000 Serpentine X FLAG Art Foundation Prize

Tokyo-based poet and artist Gozo Yoshimasu has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize, a new award that pairs £200,000 with exhibitions in London and New York. The prize will give Yoshimasu his first major solo shows in Europe and the United States, beginning with Serpentine Galleries' North space in fall 2027 and continuing at FLAG Art Foundation's Chelsea space in spring 2028.

Yoshimasu, who emerged from Tokyo's avant-garde scene in the 1960s, is best known for a practice that refuses to stay in one medium. Over the decades, he has moved between poetry, performance, photography, audio recordings, and moving image, building a body of work that treats language as something physical, unstable, and open to reinvention. In a statement, he said the recognition meant a great deal because his work has always shifted between poetry, image, and sound, and has never felt fixed.

His work has already been shown in major international contexts, including the 2026 Shanghai Biennale and the 1991 and 2026 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo. He has also appeared in surveys such as“Poet Slash Artist” at Factory International as part of the 2021 Manchester International Festival and“Sharjapan: The Poetics of Space” at the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2018. Solo exhibitions have largely been concentrated in Japan, including presentations at the Maebashi City Museum of Literature in Gunma in 2023 and the Ashikaga Museum of Art in Tochigi in 2017. In 2016, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo mounted a retrospective,“The Voice Between: The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo.”

The prize was chosen by a five-person jury from a pool of 15 artists. The panel included Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jonathan Rider, Michelle Kuo, Venus Lau, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In a joint statement, Serpentine CEO Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist described Yoshimasu as one of Japan's most radical living poets and noted that, at 87, he continues to push his practice into new territory.

The award is backed by a £1 million endowment from FLAG Art Foundation and is intended to support five artists every other year. Glenn Fuhrman, founder of FLAG, said the prize was conceived to create a New York-London exchange and to offer artists of any age from anywhere in the world the time and support to develop substantial new work. For Yoshimasu, it also marks a rare institutional spotlight on a career spent dissolving the boundaries between literary and visual form.

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