Mori Art Museum

Roppongi Crossing, the Mori Art Museum’s acclaimed triennial exhibition series, returns at the end of 2025 with ‘What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal.’ This eighth edition brings together an international cast of 21 artists and collectives to explore the elusive and layered concept of time through a diverse array of contemporary works. Co-curated by Mori’s own curators and two guest curators from Asia, the exhibition is just as interdisciplinary as we’ve come to expect from Roppongi Crossing, featuring painting, sculpture, video, crafts, zines and community-based projects. Highlights include AA Murakami’s immersive installations of fog and light, Takuro Kuwata’s bold ceramics, and sound pieces by Miyu Hosoi that transform ambient noise into meditative experiences. The subtitle, drawn from a poem by Indonesian writer Sapardi Djoko Damono, reflects the show’s philosophical heart: Even as time slips past, our memories, identities and expressions endure. Through personal, historical and ecological interpretations of time, Roppongi Crossing 2025 reconsiders the meaning of Japan in a fragmented world. It offers a poignant space for reflection, empathy and connection, where fleeting moments reveal traces of eternity.

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,...