15 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

Shigenori Uoya is an architect very much concerned with how historic townscapes such as Kyoto, where he is highly active, are in danger of disappearing. However, rather than seeking to preserve things as they are, which risks turning cities into ‘living museums’ instead of evolving with the times, Uoya seeks to reimagine storied buildings and their environments for the 21st century. The overarching objective of these projects is to create an urban legacy that can be passed on to future generations.

This exhibition explores projects including Uoya’s Container Machiya. The initiative involved the corner of a row of Kyoto machiya townhouses being covered with a steel frame, then combined with container units to create constructions that pay homage to the city’s rich architectural history while meeting the needs of today's lifestyle. In 2020, Container Machiya was selected for the JIA Young Architect Award, which recognises outstanding works by up-and-coming architects.

To illustrate the ‘materials’ with which Uoya works, this exhibition features the entire framework of a teahouse building that was earmarked for demolition, specially relocated from Kyoto’s Gojo district.

This one-of-a-kind exhibition is something of a three-way modern art love-in. A trio of world-class art museums – from Tokyo, Osaka and Paris – come together to present highlights from their collections in an imaginative new way. The exhibition concept itself draws upon the idea of the ‘trio’: key works from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Osaka’s Nakanoshima Museum of Art and the hosting MOMAT are shown in series of threes, with each group highlighting commonalities between the diverse works included.

The total of 34 trios, divided into seven chapters, is comprised of over 150 works from a lineup that reads like a who’s-who of modern art. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Henri Matisse, Yoshitomo Nara, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso are among the 100 artists featured, whose work encompasses painting, installations, sculpture, photography and more.

Trios and chapters avoid conventional means of grouping and categorising art, such as era, school or Western/Eastern. Instead a freer, borderless approach is adopted, which finds commonalities including subject matter, motifs, materials and the context in which the works were created. The result is some intriguing new ways to view, understand and enjoy modern art from the early 20th century through to the present day.

The exhibition is closed on Monday (except July 15, Aug 12) as well as July 16 and Aug 13.

‘Under the Wave off Kanagawa’, commonly known as the ‘Great Wave’, is an 1831 print by woodblock master Katsushika Hokusai that has become one of the defining images of Japan. This masterpiece has even been selected to appear on the country’s redesigned ¥1,000 banknote, which will be issued from July 2024. That posthumous glory for Hokusai is celebrated by this exhibition at the architecturally stunning museum dedicated to the artist, located in Tokyo’s Sumida, where he was born and spent most of his life.

Celebrated both in its homeland and across the world, the ‘Great Wave’ establishes Japanese culture as being deeply linked with the powerful ocean that surrounds the archipelago, and with Mt Fuji, which looms on the work’s horizon. The exhibition consists of a fascinating look at the ‘Great Wave’’s background, as part of both Hokusai’s ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’ series and a broader body of work similarly depicting the Kanagawa coast, followed by an exploration of how the image has been used worldwide as its fame and influence have risen. From this summer, the ‘Great Wave’ is set to become yet more iconic.

The debut Tokyo solo show from Los Angeles-based artist, filmmaker and writer Miranda July is one that is pertinent to our social media-fixated times. F.A.M.I.L.Y. (the initials standing for ‘Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You’), taking place at luxury house Prada’s landmark Aoyama building, is an Instagram-facilitated video installation born from the artist’s favoured method of initiating exchanges that she controls to some degree, while simultaneously inviting her counterpart in the dialogue to express desires and perform actions.

An array of screens span a section of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed flagship store, showing the results of a year-long artistic experiment in which July collaborated with seven complete strangers via Instagram. The artist sent these individuals a series of prompts, with their subsequent video responses then manipulated in her studio using the basic ‘cut-out’ tool of a social media video editing app.

These surreal performances see July and her participants together explore intimacy and personal boundaries through a new form of physical language, with the artist hoping the project might achieve what she sees as one of the promises of Instagram: that the user is looked at so lovingly that they finally ‘feel okay’.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978; Greek-born and of Italian parentage) astounded the art world of the 1910s with paintings of town squares and interior scenes that combined sharp clarity with distorted perspectives, disparate motifs, and a fantastical atmosphere in order to convey the strangeness that he felt was concealed just beyond the everyday. The artist later dubbed this style ‘metaphysical painting’.

This major retrospective is the first large-scale showing of de Chirico’s work in Japan in a decade. The artist’s almost seven-decade-long career is explored comprehensively through a series of themed sections including ‘Metaphysical Interior’, ‘Mannequin’ and ‘Piazza d'Italia (Italian Piazza)’. As these exhibits trace, after 1919 the artist pursued a more classical style of painting, yet still drew upon motifs from his earlier, more dreamlike work.

Surrealist trailblazers Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, themselves no strangers to the uncanny, were among those blown away by de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. This show, which also includes the artist’s sculptures and set designs, is a rare opportunity to immerse oneself in de Chirico’s singular vision.

This debut Japanese solo show from Chicago-born Theaster Gates takes place at one of Tokyo’s most prestigious art venues. Gates’s rise to prominence is very much part of the art world’s increasing recognition of the voices of African-American and other non-white communities. A truly multi-disciplinary creative – focused primarily on sculpture and ceramics but also working in architecture, music, performance, fashion and design – Gates strives to preserve and promote Black culture via projects as large as a Chicago initiative that has transformed over 40 abandoned buildings into public art spaces.

Also key to Gates’s vision, and a central theme of this show, is the influence that Japanese cultural and craft traditions have had on the artist over the past two decades. From initially travelling to Japan in 2004 to study ceramics, encounters and explorations over the subsequent decades have led Gates to formulate 'Afro-Mingei'. This is a creative ideology inspired by Gates’s identification of a spirit of resistance shared by Afro-American culture and Japan’s Mingei folk crafts movement. It imagines Black aesthetics and Japanese craft philosophies coming together in our globalised era to form a future hybrid culture.

Yayoi Kusama is celebrated worldwide for her abstract paintings and objects that feature repetitive rendering of a single motif: most famously those iconic polka-dotted pumpkins. The very beginnings of her artistic journey, however, saw Kusama pursue accurate and finely detailed depictions of animals, plants and familiar everyday items. As this exhibition reveals, these fledgeling works nonetheless contain the seeds of Kusama’s later practice of translating her visions and inner perceptions into figurative, abstract forms.

Works featured here, spanning the 1940s through to the present, include sketches and traditional Japanese paintings that predate Kusama’s career-shaping 1957 relocation to the United States. There are also collages that the artist worked on intensively from the 1970s to the 1990s, and prints representative of those she has been producing prolifically since 1979.

Documenting the later decades of this ongoing artistic journey, meanwhile, are 21st-century paintings characterised by figurative images, such as eyes repeated to fill the entire canvas. Finally, the artist’s three-dimensional work is represented by an infinity room installation originally created to mark this museum’s inauguration, along with the world premiere of a soft sculpture-covered boat which embodies a concept Kusama first explored in the 1960s.

Note that tickets are not available at the door; they must be purchased in advance online.

This is the first major exhibition devoted to fashion designer Takada Kenzo (1939-2020) who, besides being among the first Japanese fashion designers to find international success, was a pioneer of diversity, inclusiveness and cross-cultural mixing and matching.

A wealth of exhibits traces how, after studying fashion in Tokyo, a young Kenzo ventured alone to Paris, the world’s fashion capital, and there established his namesake label just five years later, in 1970. On the runway, Kenzo’s creations swiftly won acclaim for their unusual combinations of pattern and colour, and for the designer’s extensive use of fabrics from Japan. At a deeper level, Kenzo’s work pointed towards a future where gender, culture and national borders would all be freely transcended.

Such was Kenzo’s impact in the 1970s that the first of this show’s two main sections is devoted to his work in that decade. Exhibits here include examples of how his ’70s designs explored ‘military’ and ‘peasant’ looks, as well as embodying an approach dubbed ‘anti-couture’. The second section, meanwhile, introduces designs from a broader time frame that, while imbued with the signature Kenzo aesthetic, take inspiration from traditional costumes from across the globe.

Augmenting the many outfits are drawings and other materials that illuminate Kenzo’s design process, along with a digital presentation of his final fashion show for the Kenzo label.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, primarily for works that revolutionised modern conceptions of sculpture. This US-born artist fused artistic sensibility with his engineering training to invent the kinetic abstract mobile: the kind of moving sculpture with which he is most closely associated.

Calder’s dynamic metal-based creations loom magnificently large at what is the artist’s first Tokyo solo exhibition in almost 35 years, alongside static sculptures dubbed ‘stabiles’, as well as oil paintings and works on paper. ’Calder: Un effet du japonais’ explores, via around 100 pieces, the enduring resonance that this modernist artist’s work has with Japanese aesthetics and traditions. Though Calder never travelled to Japan, and avoided explaining the inspirations and concepts behind his work, a Japanese-style sensibility is perceptible in pieces such as 1963’s ‘The Pagoda’, a 10ft-high stabile featured here.

Other highlights reveal how Calder’s mobiles and stabiles embraced the extremes of stark all-black rendering on the one hand and pops of primary colours on the other. ‘Black Beast’ (1940) is a 14ft wide and 9ft tall stabile with a foreboding air, while ‘Untitled’ (1956) is a hanging mobile whose arrangement of leaf-like sheet-metal shapes demonstrates the artist’s pursuit of what he called ‘disparity’, over symmetry. The latter work is also a great example of how Calder’s mobiles can appear subtly different with each viewing, thanks to their multiple moving elements.

A special touch to this exhibition is given by the spatial design, which combines geometric principles favoured by Calder with references to modern Japanese architecture and materials.

Manga lovers, as well as those simply curious about this dynamic and enduring element of contemporary Japanese culture, should check out this career-so-far retrospective from Clamp. This four-strong, all-female collective, hailing from Kyoto and Osaka, are among the country’s most critically and commercially successful mangaka. With well over 100 million manga book sales to their name, Clamp’s most famed titles include ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’ and ‘xxxHolic’.

This extensive exhibition celebrates the collective’s success by tracing their story from the 1980s, when Clamp were founded as an eleven-member group to create dojinshi (self-published manga), right through to their character design for 2024 anime ‘The Grimm Variations’, which was released worldwide on Netflix.

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is famed for a broad spectrum of activity that ranged from the deeply abstract, such as sculpting with fat and felt, to ‘aktion’ (actions) that had direct social and political significance. For this German-born artist who had experienced World War II, the act of participating in society to shape the future was a form of art that he called ‘social sculpture’.

This exhibition, at the in-house gallery of Omotesando’s fashionable Gyre complex, takes an imaginative approach to exploring Beuys’ continued relevance from a Japanese perspective. Here, objects that Beuys used in his aktion is displayed within museum-style vitrines. These glass cases are presented as ‘complete’ Beuys works, and arranged in a manner that forms engaging dialogues with five Japanese contemporary artists from the postwar period. These noteworthy individuals include painter Akira Kamo, photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, and conceptual artist Wakae Kanji.

Shibuya has a major new contemporary art venue with the opening of this museum, designed to share selections from the formidable private collection of entrepreneur Kankuro Ueshima. The six-storey facility, located within a dramatically renovated building that previously housed the prestigious British School, is set up to display Ueshima’s collection of over 650 works, from foremost Japanese and international artists, to their fullest potential.

This inaugural exhibition approaches contemporary art from a variety of perspectives, with most unfolding over an entire floor of the museum. Down in the basement, the trailblazing spirit of abstract painting is explored through work that ranges in timeline from a 1991 work by Germany’s Gerhard Richter to a piece from London-based Jadé Fadojutimi, known for her investigations of identity and self-knowledge, that was completed just this year.

Spanning the first and second floors, meanwhile, is a look at individual expression that encompasses a breathtaking range of global talent: artists include Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dan Flavin and Theaster Gates, with several names being represented by multiple artworks. The power of collaborative efforts comes to the fore through pieces created by Takashi Murakami with late Off-White designer Virgil Abloh, and by Louise Bourgeois together with Tracy Emin.

The gaze of Japanese female painters is the theme explored on the third floor, through works by artists including Ulala Imai and Makiko Kudo, while on the fourth floor, works by Tatsuo Miyajima and others take diverse approaches to the notion of things changing and things disappearing. Finally, floor five is dedicated to a selection of paintings by Yoko Matsumoto, an abstract artist who derives inspiration from Western artistic modes while expressing an Asian sensibility.

Note that tickets are not available at the door; they must be purchased in advance online.

British-born artist Mark Leckey is a product of the UK’s ever-vibrant pop culture, and through diverse mediums he confronts youth, dance music, nostalgia, social class and history from an often countercultural perspective. The subcultural edge of his work – which encompasses film, sound, sculpture, performance, collage and more – additionally takes on a gritty incongruousness when enjoyed at Louis Vuitton’s sleek Omotesando exhibition space.

The French luxury house here presents two Leckey works from its collection. 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore feat. Big Red Soundsystem' (1999-2003-2010) is a film that, through a mash-up of archive footage, vividly traces the development of the UK’s underground dance music scene from 1970s disco through to the ’90s rave scene.

2013’s 'Felix the Cat', meanwhile, is a giant inflatable rendering of the cartoon cat that Leckey considers a pioneer of the digital age. Almost a century ago, this feline character was one of the first subjects to be transmitted as a TV signal.

Text by Darren Gore

Kyuyoh Ishikawa, born 1945 in Fukui prefecture, has truly dedicated his life to Japanese-style calligraphy. This encompasses not only research and criticism, in his capacity as a professor at Kyoto Seika University, but also the creation of a vast body of calligraphy work that has helped keep the art form vibrant and contemporary.

This exhibition is a comprehensive overview of Ishikawa’s own calligraphy, comprising around 300 works divided between the show’s two month-long parts (first half, June 8–30; second half, July 3–28). These creations convey how, from the earliest days of his career, Ishikawa has sought to avoid the constraints of tradition. As demonstrated by pieces seen in the exhibition’s first half, many of which are based upon classic tales such as ‘The Fifty-five Tales of Genji’, this was the case even when he was working with the earliest elements of the Japanese literary canon.

The second half of the exhibition, meanwhile, is based upon Ishikawa’s own assertion that calligraphy is not simply the writing of characters: rather, it is a means of expressing words. This notion is explored through work whose inspiration ranges from haiku poetry to the chaos of the modern world. Exhibited during this time is one of Ishikawa's most renowned pieces from his Gray Period, an 85m-long work inspired by religious text.

In teamLab's new pop-up exhibition in collaboration with the Galaxy store in Harajuku, the digital art collective's enchanted forest has been transformed into an underwater fantasy. This latest installation is also an interactive one, where visitors can use smartphones to catch, study and release the colourful sea creatures they encounter in the space. There's a great variety of marine animals to see, including fish like tuna as well as aquatic creatures that are endangered or extinct. 

To catch a creature to study it, you can use the designated app on a Galaxy smartphone to scan fish swimming in the space, or throw out a 'Study Net' towards the floor if you see something interesting darting around your feet. 

Each session is an hour-long, with daily exhibitions open from 11am until 7pm.