Top 200 Collectors

Japanese entrepreneur and investor Kankuro Ueshima may have only started to seriously collect art in 2022, but he’s quickly made up for lost time. Focusing on what he calls “contemporaneity,” Ueshima has acquired over 650 artworks from a wide range of international artists in just two years. It’s a who’s who of top artists, including historical luminaries like Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, and Andy Warhol, contemporary blue-chips like Gerhard Richter, Takashi Murakami, Theaster Gates, and Damien Hirst, and a vast swath of emerging Japanese artists. Ueshima is far from done, having acquired an additional 40 works so far in 2024.

Ueshima has pledged to be a new kind of art collector as well, at least for Japan. As Ueshima explained in a recent interview, it is unusual for Japanese collectors, in particular, to share their collections with the public. Ueshima has gone against that grain since the beginning, publicly listing his entire collection on his website and on his Instagram, with detailed descriptions for each work in English, Japanese, and Chinese. He took that effort even further this year, when he opened the Ueshima Museum in Tokyo in June.

Located in the Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen school complex, the museum spans over 15,000 square feet of Ueshima Tower. Open to the public, the museum is intended to present a rotating selection of Usehima’s collection and to help build engagement with contemporary art in Japan with interactive and educational programming for students and young curators. For the museum’s first collection exhibition, 74 works were spread across the museum’s six floors, with each floor structured around a different theme.

“I want to share art with people around the world. I’ve been showing my collection on my website and social media, but from the beginning, I also wanted to create a place for people to see the art for real,” Ueshima told Japan News earlier this year.