Monsters In My Head
Otani Workshop’s origin story.
Self-portrait at Birth, 2024, 532 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The smell hits you first. Earth, moss, something faintly damp, as if the gallery became a forest floor. Then your eyes adjust, and the creatures appear.
During a visit to Vancouver, British Columbia, to see Stereolab in concert, we took a detour. At the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Japanese artist known as Otani Workshop had his first solo exhibition in North America. The show, called Monsters in My Head, was also the name of a picture book for sale in the gift shop. I bought it immediately.
And I keep coming back to it.
Self-portrait as Lego, 2024, 534 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The artist
Otani Workshop is the name—and the persona—of Shigeru Otani, born in 1980 in Shiga Prefecture, a rural stretch of Japan near Shigaraki, one of the country’s oldest pottery centers. Otani is not a collective, not a studio, not a brand. He is one man, working largely alone in a converted tile factory, with a massive kiln, on a rural Japanese island.
Self-portrait in a Classroom, 2026, 533 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The exhibition
The gallery was filled with ceramic creatures in varying sizes: bears, beavers, schoolchildren, and Tanilla, Otani Workshop’s invented stegosaurus-like creature with a child’s face. Perched on logs and emerging from earthen mounds, they peered out from shadows. Natural material was collected for the installation, which immersed visitors into a dreamlike forest—intimate and full of so-called monsters.
Monsters in My Head, Vancouver Art Gallery, May 25, 2025–January 4, 2026.
Then there are the paintings. Hung in the main gallery, they differed from the sculptures, not just in form but in subject, they are looser and personal. Oil paint thickened with beeswax or clay, made the texture resemble the ceramics. But Otani’s own handwriting on the wall beside them, like a diary, told his origin story.
Memory of Sakai Sensei, 2026, 533 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The book
It is that story that is reproduced in Monsters in My Head, the picture book on which the exhibition is based. It is structured like a children’s story, which is exactly what it is—and isn’t. It follows Otani from the day he was born. It tells of growing up in Shiga, of being a child who wandered in the forest and found faces in rocks. It tells of Otani not being like the other kids. As a child he played with clay and Legos, and he watched Bob Ross make painting look like joy. In high school, his art teacher introduced him to art history, and he was forever changed. He learned over time, little by little; from Bob Ross, from Haniwa tomb figures, and from the masters he’d never meet.
Self-portrait as Bob Ross, 2026, 533 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The book accumulates the way children’s stories often do, with each image building on the last, so that the world grows larger and stranger with every page. The text is handwritten, simple, childlike. In English and Japanese, side by side.
Studying Sculpture, 2026, 533 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
An Ancient Egyptian Sculptor, 2026, 533 x 457 x 23 mm, oil on canvas with wooden frame. ©2024 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The eleven paintings reproduced inside the book are the same picture book paintings that hung on the gallery walls. But in the book, they feel different—in your hands they become something private.
Otani Workshop’s art occupies the ancient and the childlike, the ominous and the cute, the universal and the personal. And after reading Monsters in My Head, you can understand the provenance.
The book ends, as origin stories do, with the beginning of everything. He became an artist. The monsters, the ones in his head that had always been there, found home.
The cover of Monsters in My Head by Otani Workshop. ©2025 Otani Workshop/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Monsters in My Head (36 pages, handwritten bilingual text, eleven original paintings) is available through Perrotin New York.
