Top 200 Collectors

The cofounder of the international manufacturing behemoth, Misumi Group, Hiroshi Taguchi began collecting art in 1996. He first started out by building a corporate collection, called the Misumi Collection, which focused on American Pop art and later expanded to include works from international artists and now numbers over 500 works.

When Taguchi stepped down from his role at Misumi in 2002, he started amassing his own collection, called the Taguchi Art Collection. In 2013, His daughter, Miwa Taguchi-Sugiyama, took over the management of the collection, including acquisitions and mounting exhibitions across Japan. It’s all an effort to create a “collection for everyone,” as Miwa told ARTnews. “The most important mission of Taguchi Art Collection is to provide the opportunity to enjoy contemporary art throughout the country. We are always trying to enhance our collection so that we can provide quality work for people. It’s so exciting.”

Collecting across various mediums, the Taguchis’ holdings include work by Japanese artists like Yayoi Kusama, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Takashi Murakmi, Yutaka Sone, Yoshitomo Nara, and Yoko Ono, as well as international artists like Korakrit Arunanondchai, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson, Adrian Ghenie, Rashid Johnson, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Kehinde Wiley, and Keith Haring, whose art, after a chance encounter in the ’80s on the streets, inspired Hiroshi to take up collecting.

New acquisitions in 2022 included Ryan Gander, Yinka Shonibare, Kader Attia, and EUGENE STUDIO (Eugene Kangawa), the youngest ever artist to have an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. The Gander work, titled Time Well Spent (2019), is consists of a vending machine that requires the collectors to sell editioned works by the artist. “We thought it would be interesting to sell the artist’s works in this vending machine here and there during collection exhibitions at art museums around Japan,” Miwa added.