Kansai rewrites the map of contemporary art with Art Osaka 2026

The Galleries Section had been reorganised into four formats (Galleries, Focus, Wall and Screening) this year – a structure that allowed historically significant figures, emerging voices and everything in between to share a single floor without any one register dominating. The 28 galleries in the main section ranged from established Tokyo names like Nishimura Gallery and Megumi Ogita Gallery to Kansai institutions such as Tezukayama Gallery and Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery, with international first-timers including Galerie Stephanie from the Philippines and Woong Gallery from Korea making their Art Osaka debuts.

The Focus section rewarded closer attention. Gallery Nomart, long known for championing experimental practice and for nurturing the early career of sculptor Kohei Nawa, presented a solo exhibition by Kana Ueda, a recipient of Osaka’s prestigious Sakuya Konohana Award. Elsewhere in Focus, Unfold Gallery, directed by a Taiwanese-born gallerist, staged a two-person presentation by Wei-Ni Lu and Yuki Miyake, offering one of the section’s more quietly compelling cross-cultural dialogues.

The Screening format continued Art Osaka’s growing commitment to moving image work, foregrounding three artists – Shuhei Nishiyama, Bo Na Park and Nobuyuki Osaki – in a programme that built on 2025’s offering: an acclaimed series of historical films curated by Gen Umezu.

Down in Kitakagaya, the Expanded Section remained the fair’s most viscerally exciting proposition. Thirteen projects by 15 artists engaged directly with the physical memory of the former shipyard, producing work that could exist nowhere else.

Among the highlights was Takemi Nishimoto’s 30-metre-long site-specific installation on the building’s upper floors, a work of overwhelming scale that seemed to grow from the bones of the building itself. The artist duo Antitail (Takashi Kunitani and Tomoko Hashimoto) contributed a neon-based spatial installation in which light constructs an inside and an outside, inviting visitors to consider how a frame can alter perception entirely.

Goki Muramoto’s interactive projection-based work and Keito Mitoma’s video installations added further range, while Taiwanese ceramic artist Lai Ko-Wei brought an international dimension that reflected the section’s increasingly regional ambition.

Presented at the Galleries Section venue, the curated exhibition ‘Another 1990s – Kansai Artists Beyond Time’ was perhaps the most intellectually substantive addition to this year’s programme. Responding to a wave of major institutional reassessments of postwar Japanese art, including recent shows at the National Art Center, Tokyo and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, the exhibition proposed an alternative, Kansai-centred reading of the decade. 

The 1990s, after all, were a period of profound disruption in Japan, with the collapse of the economic bubble, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the onset of what came to be known as the ‘lost decades’. The artists gathered here sustained rigorous practice through all of it, often outside the spotlight of Tokyo-centric institutional narratives. The exhibition made a compelling case for their place in the story.

Art Osaka has always understood that an art fair is only as interesting as the city around it, and with a strong line-up of concurrent exhibitions taking place across the city, 2026 was no exception. To name one highlight, the Nakanoshima Museum of Art is currently presenting ‘Enfants Terribles, Premonitions of Oblivion’, a major show featuring Yasumasa Morimura, Kenji Yanobe and Miwa Yanagi – three figures who have defined the international reputation of Japanese contemporary art since the 1990s.

Yanobe’s monumental Ship’s Cat (Cosmo Red), a 3.8-metre sculpture of considerable charisma, was also on public view at Grand Green Osaka’s Valley Space, offering a piece of spectacle for anyone approaching the fair by foot.

Art Osaka 2026 made a persuasive argument for Osaka as the most vital site for contemporary art in Japan right now. The fair demonstrated that the city can juggle both history and reinvention, and that it does so with incredible creative energy.