R esearch the biography of any prominent Japanese artist in the last 100 years and you'll likely run into terms such as Bunten, Teiten, Shin Bunten and Nitten. Though the plethora of names may be off-putting, they all refer to the same thing: Japan's largest, annual open art exhibition.
In 2006, for example, 13,526 works were submitted to Nitten, of which 2,255 were selected. This autumn the exhibition will celebrate its centenary with a move from its redbrick home at Ueno's Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art to the curvy, futuristic National Art Center Tokyo in Roppongi. To mark this, a major exhibition of works from the first 100 years is now on display at NACT.
The name changes that the competition has undergone reflect varying degrees of government interference and control in the prewar period, and its final establishment as a competition independent of central government in the postwar period.