Tadashi Kawamata (born in Mikasa, Hokkaido, 1953) is a Japanese installation artist whose work became known in the 1980s for interventions made with reclaimed timber in galleries and urban spaces. He studied painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts, where he became interested in structuralist theory and in art as a process rather than an object.
In 1979 he began building timber partitions and structures inside interiors, such as Measure Scene 2, aiming to make visitors aware of the space around them. In 1982, at the age of 28, he was one of three artists selected for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He then worked in New York and travelled across Europe, the Americas and South America. In 1987 he took part in Documenta 8 with an intervention in a bombed church in Kassel, enclosed by a timber structure that seemed to hold it up.
His large-scale, ephemeral and collective works raise questions about architecture and permanence, and draw attention to class division in big cities. From the 2000s his work acquired an ecological dimension, referring to waste accumulation and to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Since 2006 he has divided his time between Paris and Tokyo, where he also teaches in Paris. His legacy lies in bringing urban, participatory installation to a central place in contemporary art.