Contemporary Japanese Artists
Imago Mundi - Luciano Benetton Collection

Texts by Luciano Benetton and Masahiro Nomoto

Imago Mundi, the global art project, dedicates a new collection to the Ainu, the ancient people living in the North of Japan: a frontier land, rich in forests and mountainous wilderness. The 52 works are a small but invaluable way for us to adopt a different perspective on the present and help us understand how each culture is essentially, and above all, an inter-culture, or in other words, the heart of an infinite variety of connections and mutual influences. Looking at them one feels a sense of great respect for the mystery of a people that can be summarized in the motto of a native oral poem: Ainunenoanainu, human truly human. 

Ainu. Contemporary Japanese Artists is an Imago Mundi collection, a cultural, democratic, global, non-profit project, promoted by Luciano Benetton with the aim of creating the widest possible mapping of the different contemporary artistic experiences of our world. In Imago Mundi, each country is represented by the works of established artists and new talents, commissioned with the maximum freedom of expression, whose only constraint is the 10x12 cm format.

www.imagomundiart.com is the web platform of the entire project