Tarō Okamoto

Tarō Okamoto was a Japanese avant-garde artist whose work ranged across painting, sculpture, photography, calligraphy, and architecture. After formative years in Paris, where he engaged with abstraction, Surrealism, and ethnology, he returned to Japan and became a prominent force in postwar art. His best-known public work, the Tower of the Sun, served as the central symbol of Expo ’70 in Osaka, while his studies of Jōmon pottery shaped influential ideas about Japanese artistic identity.