Japanese artists Hikaru Fujii and Chikako Yamashiro have won the second Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, which was launched by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in collaboration with the Tokyo Arts and Space in 2018 to support Japanese midcareer artists. Fujii and Yamashiro will each receive a prize of nearly $30,000 that will be distributed over the course of two years. An exhibition of the laureates’ work will also be staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2022.

The artists were selected by an international committee that included Yukie Kamiya, director of the Japan Society Gallery in New York; Fumihiko Sumitomo, director of Arts Maebashi in Japan; Doryun Chong, deputy director and chief curator of M+ in Hong Kong; Carol Yinghua Lu, director of the Inside-Out Museum in Beijing; Yuki Kondo, program director of Tokyo Arts and Space; and curator and writer Maria Lind. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, the date and the venue of the award ceremony have yet to be determined.