'The thing that has been consistently with me is the notion of creating something today that didn't exist yesterday; to make things for me is a kind of curiosity," says the prolific 55-year-old artist Shinro Ohtake.

This unassuming inquisitiveness, as well as his obsession with pasting random fragments of print and trash in dense juxtaposition to create "garbage art," were what first brought Ohtake popularity in the 1980s. His career has been a constant evolution, though, in which he has produced unparalleled amounts of work and explored diverse genres. In doing so, he has acted as a vanguard for contemporary art with a rebelliousness and disorder that the arts scene in general seems to lack.

The first major retrospective exhibition ever devoted to the painter and his massive output, "Shinro Ohtake Zen-kei: Retrospective 1955-2006" is currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT).