__NOTOC__ (June 24, 1955 - November 4, 2009) was a Japanese artist, born in

Hyōgo Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kansai region of Honshu. Hyōgo Prefecture has a population of 5,469,762 () and has a geographic area of . Hyōgo Prefecture borders Kyoto Prefecture to the east, Osaka Prefecture to the southeast, an ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

and best known for his installation work involving candles. He graduated from the undergraduate program at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now known as

Tokyo University of the Arts or is the most prestigious art school in Japan. Located in Ueno Park, it also has facilities in Toride, Ibaraki, Yokohama, Kanagawa, and Kitasenju and Adachi, Tokyo. The university has trained renowned artists in the fields of painting, scul ...

) in 1980 with a degree in oil painting, and completed a graduate program in mural work in 1982. From 1985 to 1989 he lived and worked in Germany at the

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is the academy of fine arts of the state of North Rhine Westphalia at the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. Notable artists who studied or taught at the academy include Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Magdalena Jetelová, ...

on a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service) grant. He returned to Japan in 1989 and began working at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music as an assistant, eventually matriculating to a full professorship. In 1999 he was one of the founding professors of the university's Inter-Media Arts program. He was also one of the main organisers of the Toride Art Project, a community arts project based in

Toride file:Oohorinowatashi 001.JPG, 260px, Ohori-no-watashi is a Cities of Japan, city located in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 104,329 in 44,755 households and a population density of 1492 persons per km². The p ...

City in Ibaraki,

. More recently he had done extensive work founding the Ino Artists Village. As an artist, Watanabe had exhibited extensively around the world, completing exhibitions in Turkey and Germany shortly before his death. He died from sudden heart failure on November 4, 2009.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Watanabe, Yoshiaki 1955 births 2009 deaths Japanese installation artists People from Hyōgo Prefecture Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumni