By Paul Laster

Preparations for Art Week Tokyo (AWT) are in full swing and the city-wide event promises to be more ambitious than ever. Born out of discussions with like-minded peers aiming to bolster their local and regional art ecosystems while engaging international audiences, the innovative event was co-founded in 2021 by owner and director of Take Ninagawa gallery, Atsuko Ninagawa and Japanese art collector and investor Kazunari Shirai, among others. Organized in collaboration with Art Basel, AWT 2024 opens with VIP preview days on November 5 and 6, followed by public days on November 7–10.

‘Art Week Tokyo is a complex event with many layers, but I think that’s what makes it unique,’ Ninagawa says. ‘It’s important for us to create a bridge between galleries, museums, and other art spaces to show how the different sectors of the art scene complement and enrich each other. Through the AWT Focus platform, we also want to make new connections between historic and cutting-edge practices in Japan, which can sometimes feel disconnected. We involve other cultural fields, from architecture and music to food, which helps to attract diverse audiences to engage with contemporary art. Visitors to Art Week Tokyo will come away with a broad idea of the Tokyo art scene, but they will also have deep experiences that wouldn’t really be possible for someone on their own – even for local art professionals.’

Now in its fourth edition, each year AWT features exhibitions at more than 50 galleries and institutions in the first week of November and has added new programming and highlights every year. In 2021, the week launched with exhibitions, online talks, and a unique hop-on-hop-off bus with routes to four gallery neighborhoods, while in 2022 AWT added a bar with original artist cocktails in an environment designed by architect Motosuke Mandai, and a video program with works by Japanese and international artists, curated by Adam Szymczyk.

The 2023 edition upped the ante with the addition of AWT Focus, a curated sales platform with a historical scope. Kenjiro Hosaka, guest curator of AWT Focus 2023, and Director of the Shiga Museum of Art, Japan, was invited to reassess existing narratives of Modern and contemporary art through works drawn from AWT’s participating galleries.  

Hosaka’s resulting exhibition, ‘Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present’, explored the productive tensions that have driven the emergence of new expression in Japan over the past century, such as those between art and craft, abstraction and figuration, material and immaterial, and nature and technology. Installed across three floors at the Okura Museum of Art, the show highlighted more than 100 works by 64 Japanese and Japan-based artists. Bringing together sculptures by legendary ikebana artist Sofu Teshigahara, historic paintings by the likes of Atsuko Tanaka and Tsuyoshi Maekawa, and fabric pieces by mid-career artist Junko Oki, the exhibition showcased the breadth and depth of Japanese art.

Integrating elements of the city’s unrivaled dining scene into a multisensory art experience, in 2023 the AWT Bar expanded to include landscape-themed edible creations produced by Shinsuke Ishii, owner and chef of the city’s Michelin-starred Sincère. The same year, the second edition of AWT Video, titled ‘Woman Was the Sun’, was curated by Chus Martínez, Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, and featured 17 works by 14 artists who utilized imagery that alluded to different states of consciousness.

This year, AWT has taken the show on the road. In March, at Art Basel Hong Kong Conversations, a discussion between artists Takashi Murakami and Shinro Ohtake, was moderated by AWT Editorial Director, Andrew Maerkle. There was also a pop-up AWT Bar during the fair at the city’s Ronin, a celebrated izakaya-style restaurant. During the most recent Art Basel in Basel Conversations, Maerkle moderated ‘Tokyo and Beyond: Cultural Translation in Artistic Practices’, between Yuko Mohri, a critically acclaimed Tokyo-based artist representing Japan at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and Ming Wong, a Singapore-born, Berlin-based artist with a rich history of exhibiting in Japan.

Looking ahead to this fall, AWT Focus returns with an exhibition curated by Mami Kataoka, Director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Titled ‘Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia’, and again held at the Okura Museum of Art, the exhibition developed from Kataoka’s questions about how art can lead us to discover new cosmologies or universal truths amid the repeated encounters, conflicts, collapses, fusions, and rediscoveries that occur between diverse cultural identities and histories.

‘The exhibition is my attempt to think about the future of our universe through the guidance of the cosmological elements of earth, wind, and fire,’ Kataoka told Art Basel. The exhibition will unfold across four chapters, starting with representations of the world, such as Asian cosmologies and mandalas. The other chapters will spotlight, respectively, works that involve elements of physicality, performativity, ritual, prayer, handiwork, and touch; works that investigate the politics, history, and spirituality of different communities and regions; and works that consider the world through natural phenomena and materials. ‘The theme also takes inspiration from the Okura Museum of Art itself, which incorporates mythical creatures and spirits within its design by the early modern architect Chuta Ito, who traveled through different civilizations and cultures a hundred years ago,’ adds Kataoka.

Meanwhile, AWT Video returns with works selected by Sohrab Mohebbi, Director of New York’s SculptureCenter and Curator of the 2022 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. And the AWT Bar will be designed by landscape architect Eiko Tomura, whose projects include Hiroshi Sugimoto’s revitalization of the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and Expo 2025 in Osaka, with culinary delights developed by Miya Enmeiji, owner and chef of Tokyo’s Emmé.  

Highlights at the city’s institutions include Yuko Mohri’s solo project at the Artizon Museum, which responds to the museum’s collection, and in particular the works of Marcel Duchamp; interdisciplinary artist Keiichi Tanaami’s retrospective at the National Art Center; a show of ethereal installation artist Rei Naito’s new work presented in Renzo Piano’s building made of glass bricks, Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum; a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois at the Mori Art Museum; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, works from the collection of Ryutaro Takahashi, one of the preeminent collectors of Japanese contemporary art from the 1990s onward.

Complementing these institutional shows, the 2024 edition of Art Week Tokyo will again map out an exciting cross-section of the city’s galleries and art spaces, emphasizing diverse generations, programs, and neighborhoods. Gallery Koyanagi, Taka Ishii Gallery, and SCAI The Bathhouse, which, since the 1990s, have helped build the current commercial art sector, and a new generation of leaders, active since the mid-2000s, including Misako & Rosen, Nanzuka, and Take Ninagawa will all be presenting the best work by their artists.  

These galleries will be joined by up-and-coming counterparts like Hagiwara Projects, Kayokoyuki, and Leesaya and multinationals with longstanding commitments to the Japanese art scene, including Blum, Fergus McCaffrey, and Perrotin. This year’s newcomer is Pace, which will take up residence in a complex designed by Thomas Heatherwick in the newly opened Azabudai Hills development in central Tokyo, while artist-run spaces include Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery and XYZ collective.  

As with each edition, the free AWT Bus service will link all participating venues via multiple routes – and with Tokyo’s November weather similar to the comfortable climate of Art Basel in Basel in June, gallery-hopping promises to be a delight.