Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
Shigeo Otake's practice is rooted in a long-standing fascination with the natural world, especially the overlooked realms of fungi and insects. A pivotal moment occurred in 1985, when he came across a towering wild mushroom during a walk in Kyoto. That encounter stayed with him and opened a sense of the world as something constantly transforming, inhabited by life forms that blur the boundaries between plant, animal, and spirit.
Otake works primarily with classical painting techniques such as egg tempera and fresco. These are methods he studied at Kyoto City University of Arts and later explored further through travels in Europe. Otake is drawn to their luminosity, precision, and deep connection to devotional image-making. Through these techniques, he tries to render hybrid organisms and mycological visions with quiet intensity. Many of these images are shaped by years of field observation and research into Cordyceps and other parasitic fungi.
For Otake, painting is a way of constructing symbolic systems that reflect both ecological complexity and metaphysical change. He tries to build a visual language that speaks of mutation, symbiosis, and survival. His work remains grounded in the soil, yet it often reaches toward the mythical.
Otake lives and works in Kobe, where daily encounters with the natural world continue to guide the evolution of his painting.