Masanori Handa Is Rolex Protégé

LONDON—Masanori Handa, a young Tokyo-based artist, has been selected by Rebecca Horn as her personal protégé in a year-long arts mentoring initiative funded and run by Rolex.

The scheme, set up in 2002, links a young emerging talent in each of the fields of visual art, dance, film, literature, music, or theater with an established figure in their respective discipline. Handa, an installation artist who has not exhibited widely, and never outside Japan, will receive a grant of $25,000 during the mentoring year, which will help him relocate to Berlin, where Horn is based, for hands-on professional and artistic guidance. A further budget of $25,000 is available after the year is over. John Baldessari, the visual arts mentor for 2006–07, said that the basis of his relationship with his protégé, Alejandro Cesarco, was “quite simply, to talk.”

Handra was chosen from a shortlist, selected and invited to apply by a board of anonymous industry experts, that also included Nazgol Ansarinia, a mixed media artist from Iran, and Michel Groisman, a Brazilian performance artist. In addition to Baldessari, past visual-art mentors have included David Hockney and Álvaro Siza.