The posh neighbourhood of Minami Aoyama is often associated with upscale boutiques and bakeries, but the area is also chock full of small museums and galleries, which often get overlooked in favour of larger attractions in the vicinity like Meiji Jingu. Among these hidden gems is the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, dedicated to one of Japan’s most prominent masters of contemporary art.
Born in 1911, Taro Okamoto was an artist and art theorist famous for his avant-garde paintings and sculptures that have become permanent fixtures in public spaces across Japan. These include ‘Tower of the Sun’, which served as the symbol of Expo '70 held in Osaka, as well the 60m-long mural found in Shibuya Mark City titled ‘Myth of Tomorrow’. The latter carries a poignant message as it depicts the instant of an atomic bomb explosion (you can read more about the piece here).
Opened in 1998, the museum served as Okamoto’s primary studio and residence for the last 44 years of his life. Okamoto, who moved from Japan to Paris at the age of 18, spent the beginning of his career exploring abstraction. He later went on to become the youngest member of the Abstraction-Création group in 1933. Four years later, he left the group and turned his attention to the Surrealism movement and rubbed shoulders with pioneers by the likes of Max Ernst and Man Ray.
Highlights at the museum include the back gallery, where Okamoto conceived his ‘Tower of the Sun’ sculpture and created all of his paintings from 1954. The paint splatters in the studio and the half-finished work on the shelves are all left untouched since the artist’s death in 1996. The front garden is a little unruly – a tiny jungle in the middle of a stiff collar neighbourhood – and is the personification of Okatmoto’s unique artistry in the immediate years following World War II.
