TOKYO.- At a formal ceremony in Tokyo, His Imperial Highness Prince Hitachi, honorary patron of the Japan Art Association, paid homage to the winners of the organization’s 2015 Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award. The 2015 laureates, who have shown extraordinary achievement in the fields of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music and Theatre/Film, are Japanese graphic designer and artist Tadanori Yokoo, German sculptor Wolfgang Laib, French architect Dominique Perrault, Japanese-born British pianist Mitsuko Uchida and French ballerina Sylvie Guillem. Each received a specially-designed gold medal, a testimonial letter from the Prince, and a check for 15 million yen (approximately $122,000). Biographies of all the winners can be found here.

Now in its 27th year, the Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award is one of the most prestigious international prizes in the fields of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music and Theatre/Film. The prize has become a powerful voice for the importance of cultural expression in today’s world, bringing international attention to the arts in much the same way as the Nobel Prize brings attention to the sciences.

In September, The Japan Art Association awarded its other annual prize, the Grant for Young Artists, to Myanmar’s Yangon Film School (headquartered in Berlin). The award, which brings with it 5 million yen (approximately $41,000), recognizes a group or institution that encourages young people’s involvement in the arts. The Grant for Young Artists was launched in 1997 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Praemium Imperiale.

The Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award
The 2015 Praemium Imperiale laureates join 134 of the greatest cultural figures of the 20th and 21st centuries. They include Ingmar Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Peter Brook, Anthony Caro, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Norman Foster, Athol Fugard, Frank Gehry, Jean-Luc Godard, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Akira Kurosawa, Renzo Piano, Robert Rauschenberg, Mstislav Rostropovich and Ravi Shankar. A complete list of winners can be found here.

The Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award was created in 1988 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Japan Art Association and to honor the late Prince Takamatsu, who was the association’s honorary patron for 58 years.

Cultural and International Leaders Nominate Winners
The winners of the Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award are chosen by the Japan Art Association from a group of artists nominated by advisors from United States, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Each advisor is guided by the recommendations of a nominating committee comprising cultural leaders from his home country.

Leading the American nominating committee is William Luers, a former president of the United Nations Association of America and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a retired American ambassador and diplomat. This is Mr. Luers’ 14th year as American Advisor since succeeding David Rockefeller, Jr., now an honorary advisor.

In addition to Mr. Luers, the international advisory panel includes the statesmen and business leaders Lamberto Dini, a former Italian prime minister; Christopher Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and former Chairman of the BBC Trust; Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of Germany’s Goethe-Institut; former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin; and Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former Prime Minister of Japan.

The honorary advisors are Jacques Chirac, former President of France; philanthropist David Rockefeller, former CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank; David Rockefeller, Jr., a philanthropist and environmentalist; former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; and François Pinault, founder of Kering, the French retail conglomerate.

Previous winners of the Grant for Young Artists include the Instituto Superior de Arte (Cuba); the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School (Lodz, Poland); the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music (Vietnam); the Ulster Youth Orchestra (Northern Ireland); The Sphinx Organization (Detroit (MI) USA), which develops young Black and Latino classical musicians; and the Kremerata Baltica Chamber Orchestra (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia).