Tokyo-based poet and artist Gōzō Yoshimasu has won the first Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Launched this year, the new partnership between Serpentine and The FLAG Art Foundation marks the start of a 10-year collaboration between the two institutions. The biennial award—the largest prize of its kind in the UK—will grant a total of GBP 1 million (USD 1.4 million) split evenly among five artists.The selection was made by a jury comprising MoMA’s chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo, Museum MACAN director Venus Lau, Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist, The FLAG Art Foundation director Jonathan Rider, and Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Born in Tokyo in 1939, Yoshimasu emerged during the avant-garde movement of 1960s Japan. His interdisciplinary practice weaves together poetry, performance, audio recordings, and photography, as well as his own video technique, “gozoCiné”—a method built around the spontaneous writing and reading of verse. While his solo shows have primarily taken place in Japan, he has participated in group exhibitions at the 2025–26 Shanghai Biennale, the 1991 and 2026 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, and the Sharjah Art Foundation’s “Sharjapan: The Poetics of Space” in 2018.

In addition to the GBP 200,000 (USD 270,000) cash prize, Yoshimasu will present two exhibitions: the first at Serpentine North in London in late 2027, followed by a reimagined version at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York in early 2028, marking the artist’s first major solo institutional presentations in the UK and the US. 

Accepting the prize, Yoshimasu said in a press release: “Upon receiving this great news, a line from one of my poems came to mind: ‘Although I am a shadow of a passenger on this planet, my soul is always absorbed in play.’”

Rider expressed enthusiasm for the artist’s upcoming projects, saying his “visual poems have yet to be experienced in a more comprehensive way by audiences in New York and London. By continuing to work with and complicate language, Yoshimasu is representative of a curious and ever-evolving artist reimagining new forms of communication well into his career.”

Emmanuelle Richter is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.