With a Bigger, More International Art Week Tokyo, Japan’s Scene Is Expanding Its Reach
Observer · · g1850147
Collectors, curators and trustees from Europe, the U.S. and across Asia arrived to find established Japanese galleries, rising newcomers and international outposts showing at full strength.
Five editions in, Art Week Tokyo’s widening reach offered further proof of the renewed vibrancy of the Japanese art scene, with a record 56 participating venues. Its growth reflects an ecosystem that has expanded steadily in recent years. The city’s new galleries are flourishing while established ones are gaining international visibility. Conversely, international galleries are opening locations in the city while turning their attention to Japanese talent.
This year’s Art Week Tokyo (AWT) unfolded during a period of national stability that has fueled the steady internationalization of Japan’s art scene . A new generation of artists is gaining global visibility and representation, while fairs such as Tokyo Gendai and ACK Kyoto (which opened during the art week) foster cross-border exchange. With Tokyo Gendai set to move to the more centrally located Ariake GYM-EX and overlap with ACK in 2027, along with Tokyo Jazz Club’s successful launch this year , AWT has the potential to establish the city’s place on the global art calendar.
Momentum has certainly been building: attendance rose 33 percent in 2023 and another 15 percent in 2024, with international VIP numbers climbing sharply. This year, Art Week Tokyo representatives told Observer, VIP registrations rose approximately 36 percent over 2025. (Because AWT is an increasingly dispersed, multi-venue event, public attendance figures won’t be tallied until participating venues submit their reports after the week closes.) It drew museum groups from the Guggenheim in New York; Munich’s Lenbachhaus; and Mudam Luxembourg, as well as the American Friends of the Israel Museum and a collectors’ circle from South Africa. Also in attendance were trustees and patrons of organizations including Artists Space in New York; Dib Bangkok; M+ in Hong Kong ; MoMA in New York; Phileas in Vienna; Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation; and Tate in the U.K.
AWT’s Visiting Professionals Program brought Japanese artists and cultural professionals together with museum leaders and curators from institutions including the Bienal de São Paulo; Haus der Kunst in Munich; M+, Hong Kong; Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai; London’s Tate Modern; Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
British patron Shane Akeroyd hosted a party for the Art Week Tokyo VIP program. Directors’ panels and conversations included speakers such as Mary Ceruti (Walker Art Center), Andrea Lissoni (Haus der Kunst), Doryun Chong (M+) and X Zhu-Nowell of Rockbund Art Museum, who also curated the AWT Video section, supported by SMBC . “Art Week Tokyo has grown tremendously as an event year on year since its soft-launch edition during the pandemic in 2021,” Atsuko Ninagawa , co-founder and director of Art Week Tokyo and owner and director of Take Ninagawa, told Observer, pointing to a surge in new art patrons, curators and other professionals attending alongside many returning visitors. The locally grounded core program was augmented this year by a significant rise in partner and collateral events organized by international organizations. “It is clear from the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response of our participants that Art Week Tokyo has established November as the time for contemporary art and confirmed the potential for alternative formats to the art fair and the biennale to bridge the local and global art scenes.”
At the welcome party that kicked off the week, Andrew Maerkle , AWT’s editorial director, told Observer that a key focus has been consolidating talent and resources, creating a connected network of players in a system that would otherwise remain atomized. In his view, the art week is making the city a destination for unexpected international encounters.
A selection committee created the year’s gallery roster, which was grounded by a strong mix of long-established players such as TAKA ISHII, SCAI The Bathhouse , TOMIO KOYAMA and KOTARO NUKAGA , newer, rising galleries such as PARCEL , which joined this year, and international galleries that have opened in the city in recent years, such as Pace, alongside the inveterate Perrotin.
A major change in this year’s format was the transformation of the central exhibition, AWT Focus, traditionally led by an invited curator and presented in a single location, into a new citywide initiative, AWT FOCUS 10×10, with 10 curator-led projects at 10 venues across Tokyo. The shift aligns with Art Week Tokyo’s founding ethos of community and shared resources while creating more opportunities for international exchange.
One of the highlights of AWT FOCUS 10×10 was Julianxxx ’s first solo exhibition in Japan at Space UN, which was curated by Ekow Eshun. (Since opening two years ago, Space UN has become a pioneering platform for artists from Africa and the African diaspora in Japan.) A poet, filmmaker and performer, Julianxxx brings together moving image, voice and music in an immersive exploration of diaspora, memory and inherited histories. Drawing on the body of work presented at the Toronto Biennial , the exhibition considers how cultural memory is carried across generations and how communities negotiate the traumas embedded in their past through ritual, sound and shared forms of expression. Moving between a desire for belonging and the search for a space of one’s own, the work unfolds as a polyphony of voices reflecting on ancestry, kinship and the possibility of finding light within fragmented pasts.
Housed in a former post office, WAITINGROOM, an experimental gallery founded in Tokyo in 2010, has long supported emerging artists working at the intersection of personal experience and broader societal concerns, from cultural heritage and social engagement to humanity’s relationship with nature. As part of AWT FOCUS 10×10, the gallery hosted “Patchwork of Ruffled Wings,” curated by the queer-feminist collective Multiple Spirits. The show extended the collective’s editorial practice, rooted in its eponymous zine, into a presentation centered on textiles and prints as carriers of messages and alternative histories. Framing cultural memory as something continually rewritten through circulation and collective exchange, it uses these narratives to address wider questions of identity and community.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, MISAKO & ROSEN , now a regular presence at international art fairs, staged a new exhibition by Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti , organized by French curator Julie Boukobza , head of the residency program at LUMA Arles. The show’s more abstract black-and-white monotypes extend a collaboration between artist and curator that began in 2025 with an unconventional project at Paris’s Hôtel Balzac, where Verzutti’s sculptures occupied a hotel bedroom in intimate dialogue with their surroundings. Conceived as portraits and afterlives of sculptures that have since entered different collections, the works capture the organic, often biomorphic forms that characterize Verzutti’s practice, recalling vegetal structures, algae and bodily shapes while retaining their playful and occasionally erotic undertones. As Boukobza suggested, the drawings function almost like the storyboard of a film that has already been made, extending the life of objects through memory and representation.
Nobuko Tsuchiya’s solo show “Ace of Hearts” at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, curated by Martin Clark, director of London’s Camden Art Centre, unfolds as an interconnected environment of sculptural assemblages that intuitively combine industrial components, organic shapes and seemingly disparate material fragments into hybrid entities with a biomorphic quality. Rather than functioning as discrete objects, the assemblages form a network of relationships in which elements hover between states of becoming: solid and soft, heavy and light, organic and inorganic, between the vibration of particles in flux and the volume of form. Tsuchiya’s materially driven practice embraces uncertainty and the unexpected, letting intuition guide encounters between contrasting, often dissonant materials. These constructions have a peculiar delicacy, and their precarious balance suggests alternative dimensions of existence in which matter itself might possess a form of consciousness. Drawing on ideas from physics, cosmology and speculative imagination, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the physical and the immaterial. As the artist suggests in her accompanying reflections, imagining the life of a particle across millions of years opens up an entirely different understanding of time and being.
Now in its fourth iteration, AWT Video sits in a dedicated pavilion in the lobby of SMBC East Tower. Curated by X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, under the title “Your Travel Guide To…,” it brought together 10 Japanese and international artists to question how places are represented, experienced and remembered. Rather than offering a conventional portrait of Japan, the program challenged the very premise of the travel guide as a supposedly neutral instrument for understanding a place, offering instead the different perspectives artists bring to the country. Through moving images, artists including Hiroyuki Oki , Linda Iha , Ken Okiishi , Shubigi Rao , Fuyuhiko Takata , Keiichi Tanaami , Kandis Williams , Cici Wu , Atsushi Yamamoto and He Xiangyu explored its geography as both physical and psychological, shaped by migration, memory, labor, technology and the circulation of images and ideas.
Concurrent institutional exhibitions across Tokyo included Mariko Mori’s long-anticipated survey “All That Shines” at the Mori Art Museum and two shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo: Minami Tada ’s first major retrospective and “Synchronic Constellation,” which explores the intertwined artistic histories of Japan and Taiwan. Another gem was WATARI-UM’s “Nam June Paik: The 20th Anniversary of His Passing,” arguably one of the most thoughtfully staged and framed presentations of the artist’s work. It revisits his early techno-gnostic and spiritualist vision of technology as a medium for karmic and universal connection and consciousness.
Another significant institutional exhibition offered a different reading of Japanese contemporary culture. “Shojo Manga Infinity: Moto Hagio , Ryoko Yamagishi , and Waki Yamato ” at the National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT) brings shojo manga into the national museum space as a fully acknowledged cultural form. Through original drawings and archival materials, the exhibition traces the careers of three pioneering artists who transformed girls’ comics in the 1970s, expanding the genre beyond romance and coming-of-age stories to address gender, sexuality, history, science fiction and the complexities of the human psyche. Emerging amid profound social and cultural change, their work also became a means of confronting the disruptions of the postwar decades: shifting gender roles, challenges to established social hierarchies, changing ideas of sexuality and identity, and the tensions between tradition and modernity. Drawing on mythology, classical literature and spiritual traditions while embracing fantasy and speculative worlds, these artists developed new visual languages through which to question the present and imagine alternative ways of inhabiting the world.
Beyond AWT’s institutional program, strong shows of established and emerging international and Japanese artists underscored the depth, diversity and vitality of the city’s gallery ecosystem. Tokyo Gallery + BTAP spotlighted works on paper by Kishio Suga from the 1970s to the early 2000s, offering a closer look at a less familiar side of the Mono-ha pioneer’s practice. At Taka Ishii Gallery , Sterling Ruby presented new paintings and works on paper in “OCEAN,” while Philippe Parreno staged a phantasmagoria of light, perception and environment at TARO NASU, and Pace brought Alicja Kwade ’s alchemical installation “La Pêche miraculeuse” to its Tokyo space in a new show.
On the younger, more experimental end of the spectrum, PARCEL debuted Kai Yoda ’s solo exhibition “The little blue frog.” In it, the Japan-born, Paris-based artist lets the unconscious drift between dreams and A.I.-generated imagery, translating it into oil paint and organic materials in an exploration of memory, instinct and the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. More cerebral, but equally layered between cognition and perception, were the new works American artist Anna Glantz showed in her Japanese debut, “Buzz Only,” at KAYOKOYUKI. In this intimate show, Glantz feels close to a Japanese sensibility, using her stratified canvases to explore the subtle tensions between abstraction and materiality..
One memorable performance of the week was Liang-Jung Chen’s ebb is to flow as wax is to wane , presented by Serakai Studio at Path Omotesando. Working with suspended black beeswax structures, candles, gravity and fire, the artist spent two days in a Sisyphean cycle of building, lighting and extinguishing, allowing the installation to evolve continuously through creation and destruction. The performance opened a suspended space, almost a capsule of time for contemplation, through an intimate engagement with the natural cycles of matter and renewal. There was something deeply resonant in this repetition, which reclaimed ritual as a means of relating to the world and finding meaning within it—a contemporary rite in a society increasingly defined by acceleration, where the time and space for such gestures, and the sense of meaning they once sustained, have largely been lost.
Completing the week’s offerings and serving as Art Week Tokyo’s gathering point at the Emergence Aoyama Complex in Minami-Aoyama, AWT Bar brought together architecture, gastronomy and contemporary art through three site-specific commissions. This year’s space, “Kuru Kuru,” designed by architect Kae Ito of Office Itokae, featured 12 stainless-steel arcs that could be rearranged as seating, surfaces or sculptural elements, creating an adaptable environment for gathering. A culinary program by Tetsuya Yamashita and Ryuichi Yokomizo of LA & LE drew its inspiration from the French word entre—meaning “between”—exploring connections and contrasts through two playful creations that challenge expectations of how food should look and taste. As in past years, three artist-designed cocktails rounded out the offering, this time by Natsumi Aoyagi, Mariko Mori and Yoshihiro Suda, each translating aspects of their practice into a drink. Mori’s bubble-gum champagne cocktail had the same cosmic spark as her art. With sound and performance events throughout the week, AWT Bar offered an informal meeting point where conversations among artists, curators, collectors and visitors could continue engaging with one another after the exhibition spaces closed.