19 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

Sound, visual art and site-specific elements blend together in innovative and challenging ways at Ambient Kyoto, a multisensory, immersive exhibition that now makes its first foray into Tokyo, landing at Azabudai Hills Gallery. The display centres on the installation ‘async – immersion’, envisioned by the much-missed Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani of Dumb Type and first presented in Kyoto in 2023.

Inspired by Sakamoto’s 2017 album async, ‘async – immersion’ features visuals by Takatani and spatial audio design by sound engineer ZAK, whose fingerprints are all over many of Sakamoto’s late-career projects. At Azabudai Hills, the work has been reconstructed exclusively for the venue, with the setup including a 26-metre-wide screen for displaying the video elements of the installation.

True to the title of the work, the aural and visual components are aligned but not fully synchronised; their constantly shifting relationship rewards attentive viewing and encourages visitors to approach the work on their own terms.

Minami Tada (1924–2014) was a quietly radical figure in post-war Japanese art whose practice unfolded across sculpture, relief, lighting and architectural space. Working at the intersection of art, design and emerging industrial technologies, Tada developed a distinctive visual language that embraced transparency, reflection and light – materials and phenomena closely tied to Japan’s rapid economic growth. As a pioneering female artist operating in a male-dominated field, her work anticipated many later conversations around spatial perception and the expanded field of sculpture.

From August 29 to December 6, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo presents the artist’s first solo exhibition in Tokyo in 35 years. This long-overdue retrospective traces the arc of Tada’s career, from early paintings to her most emblematic sculptural works, as well as large-scale pieces created for architectural settings. Drawing on industrial materials and contemporary technologies, her works explore how light interacts with form and space, producing effects that shift with the viewer’s movement.

The exhibition also includes archival materials that shed light on the artist’s process and intellectual context, situating her practice within broader developments in post-war Japanese art and design. At a moment when interest in overlooked modernist figures is growing both in Japan and internationally, ‘Still, shimmering light’ offers a timely reassessment of an artist whose work feels strikingly current. Elegant, experimental and forward-looking, the exhibition reintroduces Tada as a vital voice in the history of contemporary art.

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum hosts an exceptional exhibition showcasing masterpieces borrowed from one of the world’s most iconic institutions. Founded in 1753, the British Museum houses the most comprehensive collection of Japanese art outside Japan, reflecting over a century and a half of fascination with Japanese aesthetics.

‘Edo in Focus’ brings together a carefully curated selection from the museum’s 40,000-piece collection, including folding screens, hanging scrolls and narrative handscrolls from the Edo period (1603–1868). You’ll also encounter celebrated ukiyo-e prints by eight masters, including Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai and Hiroshige, that capture the vibrancy of Edo culture.

Beyond the artworks themselves, the exhibition sheds light on the history of Japan-UK cross-cultural exchange and the figures who shaped it, such as the surgeon and early collector William Anderson. By tracing how Japanese art inspired and connected people across continents, the show invites visitors to reflect on the enduring dialogue between Japan and the world, and on Edo’s timeless artistic spirit.

A master of immersive installations that merge video, sculpture, sound, light and language, Tony Oursler is one of the most influential multimedia artists of his generation. He’s been a pioneering figure in video projection and media-based art since the 1980s, probing the uneasy intersections between technology, psychology, belief systems and contemporary society. Drawing equally from pop culture, science, conspiracy theories, religion and the paranormal, Oursler’s work gives form to the invisible forces shaping modern life, be they data streams, surveillance or spirits, through a poetic blend of humour and unease.

‘Tony Oursler: Tech/Gnosis – Magic, Media, Art’ at Tokyo Node is the artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan, offering a comprehensive survey of Oursler’s practice from the early 1990s to the present. Key works such as Private (1994–1997), Specular (2021) and the psychologically charged installation Lock 2, 4, 6 (2010) are shown alongside previously unpublished projects and extensive archival materials drawn from Oursler’s personal collection of more than 3,000 items related to science, magic and unidentified phenomena.

A highlight is the world premiere of Empty (2000), a long-gestating collaboration with David Bowie and composer Glenn Branca, realised here for the first time. The exhibition also debuts Chimera (2026), a monumental, site-specific work conceived for Tokyo Node’s soaring 15-metre-high space, where mythical hybrid creatures appear to float above the city. In an age shaped by AI, surveillance and renewed spiritual curiosity, Oursler’s work resonates with striking urgency, challenging you to reflect on how belief, technology and imagination entwine.

From August 1, the Yokohama Museum of Art unveils a dazzling exhibition dedicated to one of history’s most iconic queens. Known as the ultimate symbol of elegance and excess, Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) transformed the aesthetics of 18th-century France and continues to shape fashion, design and visual culture today.

Curated by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and making its Japan debut in Yokohama, the exhibition traces how the young queen’s refined taste, from her ornate gowns and glittering jewels to her whimsical interiors at Versailles and the Petit Trianon, established a new mode of sophistication that bridged courtly grandeur and personal fantasy.

Through exquisite dresses, jewellery and furniture from her era, ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ explores the queen’s bold creativity and her role as a forerunner of modern self-expression. It also reveals how her image has been endlessly reinvented in art, cinema and haute couture, from rococo opulence to contemporary runways.

A celebration of beauty, rebellion and individuality, the exhibition invites visitors to rediscover the woman behind the legend – a monarch whose influence still defines the art of style.

The Buddhist priest Kukai (774–835), aka Kobo Daishi, is one of the most influential figures in Japanese religious and cultural history. The founder of Shingon Buddhism introduced esoteric teachings from China in the early ninth century, and in doing so initiated a process that has shaped spiritual practice, art and ritual across Japan for more than twelve centuries.

This landmark exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum’s Heiseikan, which marks 1,250 years since the birth of Kukai, is organised through an unprecedented collaboration among the 18 head temples of the Shingon school. It brings together an extraordinary assembly of National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties from across the country. Masterpieces such as the 12th-century painting Illustrated Legends of Mount Shigi sit alongside ritual icons connected to Shingon’s most important annual rites. A particular highlight is the rare public display of revered hibutsu (‘hidden’ Buddhist images), including statues of Kukai himself and exquisite representations of the bodhisattva Kannon, which are shown only on exceptional occasions.

Structured around themes including Kukai’s life, esoteric ritual, the network of the 18 temples and the tradition of hidden icons, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience the spiritual depth, artistic refinement and historical continuity of Shingon Buddhism – an enduring legacy that continues to resonate throughout Japan today.

A new exhibition space in the basement of the Tokyo International Forum, Yurakucho Museum is opening this July, and its inaugural exhibition brings the whimsical world of Pingu to Japan. Running from July 10 to September 6, it features priceless clay models used in actual animation production, alongside storyboards and other production materials. What’s more, you can pretend to be in Pingu’s Antarctic igloo with a photo spot made to look like the penguin boy’s home.

While you’re there, take the opportunity to study Pingu’s facial expressions, unique play-doh-like contortions and language, and maybe you’ll learn to decipher his noot noots once and for all. The exhibition also includes three collaborative art pieces by renowned miniature photographer and artist Tatsuya Tanaka, who has reimagined Pingu with everyday items.

Tickets are now on sale via Epus.

Revered for his ability to capture the human condition in all its complexity, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), the Dutch master whose genius extended across painting, drawing and printmaking, revolutionised the medium of etching, transforming it into a vehicle of artistic expression equal to painting. The Leiden native’s mastery of light, shadow and texture, combined with a deep empathy for his subjects, continues to define the essence of the Baroque spirit.

The National Museum of Western Art’s ‘Rembrandt the Etcher: His Challenges and His Impact’ – a special exhibition co-organised with the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam – brings together two notable collections. It traces Rembrandt’s relentless experimentation with etching techniques, revealing how he expanded the expressive potential of printmaking.

The exhibition’s second half explores Rembrandt’s enduring influence on later generations of artists, from Goya and Whistler to Matisse, who rediscovered his innovations centuries later. Featuring artworks as well as rare books and drawings, the display celebrates the timeless impact of Rembrandt’s art and his transformative vision as a printmaker.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum’s ‘Lucie Rie: Elegant Vessels Fusing East and West’ is a major retrospective dedicated to one of the most influential ceramic artists of the 20th century. Born in Vienna in 1902, Rie developed her artistic vision at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts or School of Applied Arts) before establishing herself as a ceramic artist. Forced to flee Austria in 1938, she rebuilt her life and career in London, where she created a distinctive body of work characterized by elegant wheel-thrown forms, delicate incised and inlaid decorations, and luminous glazes.

Combining precision, experimentation and extraordinary sensitivity to form, Rie’s vessels embody a rare balance of strength and grace. This exhibition marks the first large-scale survey of her work in Japan in nearly a decade and brings together outstanding examples from Japanese collections, including works from the renowned Iuchi Collection.

The exhibition traces Rie’s artistic evolution from her early years in Vienna to the height of her career in Britain. It also explores her connections with key figures such as Josef Hoffmann, Bernard Leach, Hans Coper and Shoji Hamada, revealing how dialogues between European modernism and East Asian ceramic traditions shaped her creative practice.

Presented throughout the museum’s celebrated Art Deco Main Building and Annex, the exhibition engenders a compelling conversation between Rie’s elegant vessels and the refined architecture of the former residence of Prince Asaka.

Daniel Buren has spent more than six decades questioning where an artwork begins and where the surrounding world enters into it. Internationally renowned for his unmistakable 8.7cm vertical stripes, the French artist has transformed this seemingly neutral motif into a rigorous conceptual tool, using it to expose the architectural, historical and symbolic conditions of every site he inhabits. This spring and summer, Scai Piramide in Roppongi presents ‘Situated Works 1966-2013’, a rare survey spanning nearly fifty years of his practice.

The exhibition traces Buren’s evolution from his early, radical interventions of the 1960s to luminous optical-fiber works produced in the 2010s. Historical pieces such as Peinture aux formes variables reveal the moment when the striped industrial fabric first became his defining visual language, while the Five Elements paintings, originally created for a 1989 exhibition in Nagoya, demonstrate his persistent dismantling of expressive authorship and painterly convention.

In later galleries, Buren expands this inquiry through works integrating LED-lit optical fibers, where colour and light become spatial phenomena rather than fixed surfaces. Their shimmering presence underscores the artist’s long-held conviction that colour is the irreducible core of visual experience. Deeply connected to Japan, Buren here appears as an artist whose disciplined investigations continue to sharpen our perception of space itself.

Food is one of the most universal aspects of human life, yet it’s also deeply personal, shaped by memory, place, community and social change. This summer, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum explores these connections in ‘Tomorrow’s Dining Table’, an exhibition drawn from the museum’s collection of approximately 39,000 photographic and moving-image works.

Bringing together works by fourteen artists, including Rinko Kawauchi, Ikko Narahara, Tokuko Ushioda and Tatsumi Orimoto, the exhibition examines food as a lens through which to consider human relationships and contemporary society. Structured into four thematic sections, it traces the many meanings attached to eating and sharing meals.

The opening chapter focuses on personal and family memories, presenting intimate photographic reflections on everyday dining experiences. ‘Between Food and Place’ shifts attention to the connections between food and local environments, from fishing communities to urban landscapes, highlighting how geography shapes culinary culture.

‘Within the Environment’ addresses pressing contemporary issues, including ecological change, food production and the long-term consequences of environmental disasters. The final section, ‘Tomorrow’s Dining Table’, considers the future of eating in an aging society marked by solitary living and changing social structures.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of Japan’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, whose practice spans photography, architecture and stage production. At the core of his work lies a profound engagement with analogue silver gelatin photography, a medium he has elevated through rigorous conceptual frameworks and extraordinary technical mastery, even as it faces obsolescence in the digital age.

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo now offers a major survey that traces the evolution of Sugimoto’s photographic practice from the late 1970s to the present. Featuring approximately 60 silver gelatin prints, the exhibition brings into focus a medium the artist recognises as endangered, while asking broader questions about truth, memory and time.

Structured into three chapters, the exhibition spans 13 series, from early works that established Sugimoto’s reputation to later bodies of work that probe abstraction, perception and the limits of representation. Newly unveiled pieces, including additions to the Diorama series, offer fresh insight into themes Sugimoto has pursued for more than half a century.

The exhibition’s title refers to a deeper meditation on what is disappearing from contemporary visual culture. As digital images become infinitely mutable, Sugimoto reasserts photography’s original power as a medium of evidence and presence. Through its breadth and philosophical depth, ‘Extinction’ is set to offer a rare opportunity to reflect on photography’s past, and its uncertain future, through one of its most rigorous practitioners.

When the boundless imagination of Pablo Picasso meets the vibrant creativity of Sir Paul Smith, fireworks follow. Picasso (1881–1973), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, revolutionised modern art with his radical innovations in form and colour. British designer Smith, noted for his playful approach to tailoring and his masterful sense of colour and pattern, brings his unique sensibility to the table, transforming the NACT’s galleries into a dialogue between art and fashion, and tradition and reinvention.

‘Adventure of Playful Spirits’ offers a fresh encounter with approximately 80 works from the Musée National Picasso-Paris. Following the success of the 2023 Paris exhibition ‘Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light!’, this Japan edition invites visitors to rediscover the painter’s creative evolution from his early Portrait of a Man to the tender Paulo as Harlequin, through Smith’s imaginative spatial design.

From colour-splashed walls to whimsical décor, every element of the exhibition reflects Smith’s joyful spirit and his fascination with artistic play. This meeting of two creative giants – one who shaped modern art and another who redefined contemporary design – conjures up a vibrant, immersive world where curiosity, humour and craftsmanship intertwine.

The Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo’s summer exhibition centres the café as one of the most vital laboratories of modern art. In late 19th-century Paris, cafés, cabarets and dance halls became informal studios and debating chambers, where artists such as Manet and the future Impressionists exchanged ideas, challenged conventions and distanced themselves from the authority of official salons. Art, for the first time, began to mingle with the rhythms of everyday urban life.

Through approximately 130 works, the exhibition charts how these spaces shaped new artistic sensibilities. Paintings and prints by Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and their contemporaries reveal cafés as sites of pleasure, isolation and observation – places where modernity’s contradictions came into focus. The narrative then extends beyond Paris to Barcelona, where in 1897 the Catalan artist Ramon Casas opened Els Quatre Gats (‘Four Cats’), inspired by Montmartre’s famed Chat Noir (‘Black Cat’). The café became a creative hub for a young Pablo Picasso, whose encounters with its bohemian atmosphere would feed directly into the emotional intensity of his Blue Period.

A particular highlight is Casas’s Madeleine, a masterpiece shown in Japan for the first time in 35 years. Together, the works illuminate how the café functioned as a catalyst for some of the most enduring innovations in modern art.

A visionary who worked along the boundaries between art, design and everyday life, Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Italian design. Rising to prominence in the 1950s through his groundbreaking work for the typewriter and computer manufacturer Olivetti, Sottsass redefined industrial design by infusing functional objects with emotion, symbolism and wit. His restless creative spirit culminated in the 1981 founding of the Memphis Group, an international collective whose bold colours, playful forms and radical aesthetics came to define post-modern design and reshape global visual culture.

‘Design begins where magic begins’ at the Artizon Museum is the first comprehensive retrospective of Sottsass’s work in Japan. Drawing from the Ishibashi Foundation’s extensive collection, the exhibition brings together 112 works spanning the entirety of its subject’s long and prolific career, from early experiments to later, more philosophical creations.

Through furniture, industrial design and conceptual works, the exhibition traces Sottsass’s lifelong challenge to strict rationalism and his belief that design should reflect the emotional and spiritual dimensions of human life. Humour, colour and sensuality emerge as tools with which he sought to illuminate the lived experiences, desires and contradictions of modern society. Offering a rare opportunity to encounter Sottsass’s work in depth, the exhibition reveals a visionary who insisted that true design begins with imagination and magic.

Daniel Buren has spent more than six decades questioning where an artwork begins and where the surrounding world enters into it. Internationally renowned for his unmistakable 8.7cm vertical stripes, the French artist has transformed this seemingly neutral motif into a rigorous conceptual tool, using it to expose the architectural, historical and symbolic conditions of every site he inhabits. This spring and summer, Scai Piramide in Roppongi presents ‘Situated Works 1966-2013’, a rare survey spanning nearly fifty years of his practice.

The exhibition traces Buren’s evolution from his early, radical interventions of the 1960s to luminous optical-fiber works produced in the 2010s. Historical pieces such as Peinture aux formes variables reveal the moment when the striped industrial fabric first became his defining visual language, while the Five Elements paintings, originally created for a 1989 exhibition in Nagoya, demonstrate his persistent dismantling of expressive authorship and painterly convention.

In later galleries, Buren expands this inquiry through works integrating LED-lit optical fibers, where colour and light become spatial phenomena rather than fixed surfaces. Their shimmering presence underscores the artist’s long-held conviction that colour is the irreducible core of visual experience. Deeply connected to Japan, Buren here appears as an artist whose disciplined investigations continue to sharpen our perception of space itself.

Ron Mueck has long been celebrated for redefining figurative sculpture through extraordinary craftsmanship and emotional acuity. After early work in film and advertising, the Australian-born, UK-based artist emerged on the contemporary art scene in the mid-1990s, gaining international attention with Pinocchio (1996) and Dead Dad (1996-97), the latter exhibited in the landmark ‘Sensation’ show at London’s Royal Academy in 1997.

Over the decades, his meticulously crafted human figures, rendered at startlingly altered scales, have probed themes of vulnerability, solitude, resilience and the fragile complexity of existence. With a rare and limited oeuvre of about fifty works, each sculpture distills months or even years of observation and reflection, resulting in pieces that feel at once hyper-real and quietly enigmatic.

From April 29 to September 23, the Mori Art Museum hosts the artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan in eighteen years. Organised in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the exhibition gathers eleven works tracing Mueck’s evolution, including six making their Japanese debut. Its monumental centrepiece is the Japan premiere of Mass (2016-17), an immersive installation of 100 giant skulls reconfigured to reflect the museum’s architecture. Other highlights include Angel (1997), Woman with Shopping (2013) and the iconic In Bed (2005), each inviting viewers into a deeply intimate emotional space.

Complementing the sculptures, photographs and films by Gautier Deblonde offer a glimpse into Mueck’s studio practice, revealing the quiet rigour behind some of contemporary art’s most affecting works.

Born in Kolkata in 1963 and now based in New York, Rina Banerjee has established herself as a singular voice in the global contemporary art scene. Drawing from her experience of migration and diasporic identity, Banerjee creates intricate, richly layered sculptures and installations out of everyday materials like cotton threads, feathers, shells and glass chandeliers. Her practice, informed by both engineering training and fine art education at Yale, navigates the intersections of postcolonial history, feminism and global exchange, often infusing critical perspectives with a subtle, disarming sense of humour.

‘You made me leave home…’ at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is an exhibition of 19 works drawn from the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Organised as part of the foundation’s ‘Hors-les-murs’ programme, which brings major artworks to venues around the world, the exhibition marks both the 20th anniversary of the Espace Louis Vuitton and a decade of the ‘Hors-les-murs’ initiative.

Spanning installation, sculpture and painting, the exhibition foregrounds Banerjee’s ongoing exploration of migration, colonial legacies and the circulation of people and objects. At its core is the monumental installation In an unnatural storm… (2008), presented publicly for the first time by the Fondation. Suspended from the ceiling in a cascading constellation of forms, the work evokes both the wonder and instability of global journeys, drawing inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

Alongside this, recent works such as Black Noodles (2023) and a new 2025 painting series extend Banerjee’s inquiry into identity as fluid, hybrid and transnational. Blending references to Indian miniature painting, Chinese silk traditions and Mesoamerican imagery, her compositions oscillate between abstraction and figuration, often conjuring enigmatic female figures reminiscent of reimagined goddesses.

Through its sensuous materiality and conceptual depth, ‘You made me leave home…’ offers a compelling meditation on displacement and belonging.

Prepare your ponchos and panniers, as Harajuku J-fashion icon Sebastian Masuda has opened his first large-scale solo exhibition in years in Hyper Museum Hanno. The exhibition, running from March 14 to August 30, is packed with psychedelic candy-coloured installation rooms, art pieces and sculptures by Masuda himself, created over the years and brought to Japan for the event.

The exhibition unfolds across six themed spaces presented in a loose chronology, tracing Masuda’s formative experiences and how he arrived at his own understanding of kawaii after navigating personal conflicts.

While it’s taking place a bit outside central Tokyo, the exhibition offers an approachable but deep dive into Harajuku kawaii while prompting a look at where the culture is headed next. Be sure to visit the museum pop-up shop, which stocks exclusive T-shirts, stickers, omamori amulets and more.

Tickets are now on sale via Asoview, Artsticker, Lawson Ticket and Seven Ticket.