UK77: Digging my way to London

"UK77: Digging My Way to London" is Shinro Ohtake's massive scrapbook-style record of the year he spent in London in 1977, the trip that set the collage aesthetic running through his work ever since.

At 656 pages, the book reproduces pages from Ohtake's own notebooks and scrapbooks from that year - flyers, ticket stubs, photographs, punk ephemera, and hand-annotated diary pages. Assembled together, they form the dense, layered visual field that has defined his practice since art school. Published by Getsuyosha in 2004, it functions less as a conventional artist's book than as a facsimile of the raw material Ohtake has drawn on for decades.

Ohtake (b. 1955, Tokyo) studied at Musashino Art University and took a leave of absence to travel to London in 1977, a trip that exposed him to punk and reggae culture and shaped his lifelong method of building work from found and accumulated material - scrapbooks, retablo-like assemblages, and large-scale paintings built from layers of collage. He is best known internationally for "I Love Yu," the bathhouse he designed on Naoshima as part of the Benesse Art Site, and for representing Japan in group exhibitions worldwide. His scrapbooks, of which "UK77" reproduces one year's worth, have run continuously alongside his exhibited work since the 1970s.