10 Must-See Exhibitions in Tokyo
Observer · · g1850147
Mariko Mori’s sweeping survey at the Mori Art Museum anchors an Art Week Tokyo that also includes shows by Philippe Parreno, Gabriel Orozco and Kour Pour, reflecting a scene growing more international—and more confident—each year.
Since co-founding Art Week Tokyo, Atsuko “Nina” Ninagawa has worked to establish early November as an essential moment in the international art calendar—a time when the global art world turns its attention to Tokyo. Now the event has returned for its fifth and most expansive edition yet, with a record 56 participating venues on the map: 32 galleries, 14 cultural institutions and 10 spaces hosting AWT Focus. This year’s special program, 10 Curators × 10 Projects, explores the vitality and diversity of Japan’s art ecosystem.
Art Week Tokyo 2026 arrives amid a period of steady growth and internationalization for the Japanese art scene . International galleries are opening in the city, art fairs such as Tokyo Gendai and ACK Kyoto (which opens later this week) are fostering cross-border exchange, and a new generation of galleries and artists is gaining visibility on the global stage. Here are 10 Tokyo exhibitions not to miss this week:
Mori Art Museum Through March 28, 2027 Mariko Mori was among the first Japanese artists to confront tensions brought about by accelerated modernization and technology’s encroachment on human life in works rooted in traditional spirituality yet attuned to the new mythologies of contemporary culture. Situated between the futuristic and the ancestral, Mori’s visual language draws on Japanese popular culture, Buddhist cosmology, Shinto beliefs and scientific research, continually questioning the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds. The Mori Art Museum is presenting the artist’s most extensive survey in years, with over 40 works spanning more than three decades—it’s absolutely worth a trip to Tokyo. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces Mori’s evolution from the post-human imagery of the 1990s to her explorations of prehistoric cultures, astrophysics and the interconnectedness of all life. Looking back on her pioneering trajectory, “All That Shines” reveals how prescient her inquiries have been, anticipating many of the questions we confront today. Mori’s return to ancestral knowledge, spiritual traditions and alternative cosmologies offers a compelling invitation to reconsider our relationship with nature, technology and the wider universe.
TARO NASU Through November 28, 2026 Philippe Parreno explores how new technologies can reshape the ways we perceive, experience and narrate the world. Rather than treating the exhibition as a container for individual works, the artist approaches it as a medium in its own right, conceiving it as an open, evolving structure—a living organism in which images, sounds, objects and events exist in an intricate choreography. TARO NASU brings together works from Parreno’s iconic Marquee and Happy Ending series, alongside a sculpture in the form of a Christmas tree. Using light as both material and narrative device, the works transform the gallery into a shifting theatrical space. The Christmas tree, whose glow persists long after the festive season has passed, introduces a particularly evocative meditation on the instability of identity, time and meaning.
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Through December 6, 2026 During Art Week Tokyo, the museum is presenting two exhibitions that offer complementary perspectives on the making of modernity in East Asia. “ Tada Minami : Still, shimmering light” is the first major retrospective of the pioneering, cross-disciplinary practice of Japanese postwar artist Minami Tada. Spanning nearly seven decades, it brings together 70 works, from early paintings and abstract sculptures to lighting installations, architectural components and archival materials, tracing a trajectory that moved fluidly among sculpture, design and architecture. Running alongside it, “Synchronic Constellation: Cross-Boundary Perspectives in Art,” curated by Taiwanese filmmaker Huang Ya-li , offers an unprecedented reassessment of the intertwined cultural histories of Taiwan and Japan. Inspired by Huang’s film Le Moulin (2015), the exhibition brings together approximately 200 Taiwanese artworks, 100 Japanese works and 500 archival materials to explore how Western modernity reached Taiwan through Japanese institutions and education and how artists reinterpreted those ideas within their own cultural and political contexts. It also examines how colonialism, urbanization, war and postwar repression shaped artistic expression on both sides.
UESHIMA MUSEUM Ongoing One of the most exciting additions to Tokyo’s contemporary art landscape, Japanese entrepreneur and collector Kankuro Ueshima ’s UESHIMA MUSEUM is presenting the third iteration of “The Image Burns, Distorts, and Sublimates into Light,” curated by Yuko Hasegawa . Drawing on a collection of more than 850 works by Japanese and international artists, the exhibition turns the museum’s six floors into a narrative journey that moves from Raqib Shaw ’s apocalyptic landscapes and the fragmented imagery of contemporary urban life to questions of digital reproduction, identity and perception, gradually dissolving the image into its most elemental condition: light. With work by artists including Gerhard Richter , Kei Imazu , Ryoji Ikeda , Anicka Yi , Pipilotti Rist and Olafur Eliasson , it creates unexpected dialogues across generations and practices, inviting visitors to reconsider how we perceive—and construct—the reality around us.
HIGASHI-YAMA Tokyo Through November 29, 2026 One of the more intriguing encounters of Art Week Tokyo, “Project O+O” brings together internationally acclaimed Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco and designer Shinichiro Ogata in an evolving dialogue between Mexican and Japanese cultures. Rooted in their longstanding friendship and in Orozco’s time living and working in Japan, the project transforms the venue into a temporary extension of the artist’s home. Artworks, personal objects, specially conceived elements, architecture and food come together in a single environment. Known for his playful yet deeply philosophical investigations of everyday materials, found objects and the hidden relationships between things, Orozco approaches art as a language capable of crossing cultural boundaries and generating new constellations of meaning. As he told Observer in a recent interview , his travels have always been driven by the desire to encounter new things to investigate. Here, craftsmanship, material sensibility and the ordinary rituals of daily life become starting points for a broader reflection on how different cultures perceive and inhabit the world.
PARCEL Through December 5, 2026 PARCEL stands out for an experimental program that looks across media and geographies, bringing international practices into dialogue with Japan’s contemporary scene. For Art Week Tokyo, the gallery is presenting the first solo exhibition in Japan by Kai Yoda . The Japanese-French artist previously worked for nearly a decade as one half of the duo Ittah Yoda. Bringing together new paintings from his ongoing Volo series, the show explores the instinctive, often elusive territories of memory, desire and the subconscious. He notably incorporates organic pigments, beeswax and other tactile materials into his works, allowing images to emerge through an intuitive process of accumulation and transformation. Informed by the cyclical temporalities and blurred identities of Gabriel García Márquez ’s One Hundred Years of Solitude , Yoda’s work here opens onto a fluid symbolic world where different geographies, memories and forms of life converge. It invites a more sensory, imaginative understanding of the interconnections between the natural and the fabricated, beyond any preestablished binary.
KOTARO NUKAGA Through November 8, 2026 KOTARO NUKAGA is one of the galleries contributing to the internationalization of the Japanese art system. On view at its Roppongi space during Art Week Tokyo is “Points of Entry,” a solo show by British-Iranian artist Kour Pour featuring new works from his ongoing Poly Painting series, which reimagines the structure of the carpet as a surface on which multiple visual traditions converge. Drawing on his personal connection to the history of Persian carpets and their intricate systems of pattern-making, Pour investigates how images, motifs, techniques and names travel across cultures, challenging the very notion of a singular origin. Combining Persian arabesques with Japanese patterns and references to the circulation of images between East and West, his paintings become layered maps of cultural exchange that expose the fragmentary nature of historical memory and the ways history is continually rewritten.
SCAI The Bathhouse Through December 19, 2026 Part of the AWT Focus program, “Ace of Hearts” is a solo exhibition of works by Nobuko Tsuchiya curated by Martin Clark , director of Camden Art Centre. Working with an eclectic vocabulary of found materials and everyday objects—from household fittings and discarded tools to plastic tubing, rags and industrial components—Tsuchiya assembles hybrid sculptural forms that hover between the organic and the mechanical, the familiar and the uncanny. She treats these varied materials as components of an interconnected environment, producing fragile structures in which unexpected juxtapositions and disparate elements enter into continuous exchange. Invoking the invisible energies and dimensions that may lie beyond our immediate perception, Tsuchiya’s symbolic articulations suggest a universe in which matter is never inert and space is never truly empty, but in flux, settling into ever-new forms. Here, she invites us to reconsider the boundaries between the physical and the immaterial by revealing a mysterious field of relations in which everything is part of everything else.
The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art Through November 23, 2026 Art Week Tokyo offers one of the last chances to catch the Watari-um Museum’s thoughtful homage to pioneering Korean new-media artist Nam June Paik , staged on the 20th anniversary of his death. Occupying two floors, the exhibition revisits some of Paik’s most iconic works while bringing into focus a less frequently explored dimension of his practice: an early techno-spiritualism, or what might be called techno-shamanism. Through it, he imagined technology as a vehicle for expanding consciousness and connecting different realms of existence. Long before our contemporary fascination with networked communication, Paik understood the potential of electronic media to create new forms of karmic and universal connection. Machines were not simply instruments of communication or tools of artistic production but also devices through which to generate new allegories, re-enchant the technological world and imagine an interconnected universe. As he wrote: “Even a chance encounter is a karmic connection from a past life,” and satellite television and interactive television had expanded the connections we could make in this life “thousands of times over.”
CON_ Tokyo Through November 8, 2026 Shota Yamauchi ’s multidisciplinary practice navigates sculpture, moving image, performance and olfactory experience to investigate the relationship between the self and the world. In recent years, the artist has explored the body as a site of exchange, distilling sweat into an aromatic essence and imagining future scenarios in which human scent becomes something to preserve and trade. In “Twilight,” Yamauchi takes the sauna as his point of departure. It is a peculiar contemporary ritual in which strangers gather in an enclosed space, surrendering to heat and steam until thought recedes and bodily sensation takes over. Bringing together new sculptures and a video installation, the exhibition turns the gallery into an immersive, sauna-like environment, with sculptures releasing mist into the space. In the accompanying film, figures move through a hot, humid landscape that could belong to a distant past or an as-yet-unrealized future, repeating gestures of sweating, breathing and enduring the heat. Restoring a sense of ritual to the gallery space, the show invites us to consider how common physical sensations might give rise to new forms of connection and communion.