The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Marking 100 years since the dawn of the Showa era and 80 years since the end of World War II, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo looks back with ‘Opening Documents, Weaving Memories’, an exhibition that reflects on Japan’s turbulent mid-20th century. With 280 works on view, the display explores how art has served both as a record of history and as a medium for reconstructing memory across generations. Spanning the 1930s to the 1970s, the exhibition unfolds across eight sections that probe the role of painting, photography and film during wartime and its aftermath. Visitors encounter powerful ‘War Record Paintings’, commissioned by the Imperial Japanese army and navy to document battles, alongside intimate portrayals of life on the home front. Works such as Ai-Mitsu’s Self-Portrait (1944) and Ken’Ichi Nakamura’s Kota Bharu (1942) highlight the complex intersections of personal expression and state narrative. Later sections trace the shifting visual language of memory, from depictions of wounded bodies in the 1950s to dialogues prompted by Vietnam War imagery in the 1970s. By juxtaposing propaganda, personal visions and post-war reinterpretations, the exhibition invites audiences to consider how museums can act as repositories of collective memory. In doing so, it opens documents of the past while weaving them into living dialogues with the present and future.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese women artists briefly rose to prominence within the avant-garde, their work shaped by the influx of the abstraction-heavy Art Informel movement from Europe. Yet as ‘action painting’ in the style of Jackson Pollock, with its emphasis on bold gestures and physical force, gained ground, women’s contributions were increasingly sidelined. The notion of ‘action’ was closely aligned with masculinity, reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies and leaving many female painters absent from critical discourse. This winter exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo seeks to reframe this narrative. On show from December 16 to February 8 2026, ‘Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan’ revisits a pivotal yet overlooked chapter of Japanese art history. Inspired by Izumi Nakajima’s acclaimed study Anti-Action: Post-War Japanese Art and Women Artists (2019), the exhibition highlights alternative strategies of creation that challenged the dominant ethos of their time. It features approximately 120 works by figures such as Yayoi Kusama, Atsuko Tanaka, Hideko Fukushima and Aiko Miyawaki, alongside lesser-known contemporaries.  Through rare and unpublished works, immersive large-scale installations and fresh scholarly perspectives, ‘Anti-Action’ reveals how these artists redefined the possibilities of art beyond the parameters of physical action, and how their legacies continue to resonate today.