On a chilly Friday evening in Tokyo, a lively young international crowd jostled to enter Nanzuka gallery for the first opening of its 20th-anniversary year. Shinji Nanzuka, the gallery’s owner, had invited the Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF, whose output includes games, scams, and fashion rip-offs, to transform the gallery into a kind of late-capitalist funhouse called ‘Material Values’.

‘I like showing MSCHF,’ Nanzuka says. ‘They create social happenings, and take risks in several ways, such as by raising legal copyright issues. This kind of broader challenge to the prevailing idea of what’s acceptable as art fits well into our gallery’s program and context.’ Judging by the lengthy line outside, the opening-night crowd certainly seems to consider Nanzuka Underground the place to be.

Youthful at age 46, wearing chic streetwear and sunglasses, Nanzuka might be mistaken at first for a pop musician or producer. The art dealer presented over 25 projects in 2024, many of them agile alternatives to conventional museum and gallery shows. What is more, the range of innovative venues he has established for showing contemporary art may in fact justify calling him an ‘impresario’ as much as a gallerist.

The current Nanzuka Underground occupies a neat three-story building on the edge of Harajuku, ground zero for Japan’s youth culture. Nanzuka opened his first eponymous gallery nearby, fresh out of graduate school in 2005. It was literally underground – in a small basement in Shibuya. Together with his mentor and friend, creator-producer Naohiro Ukawa, Nanzuka converted an adjoining studio space into a club, drawing a late-night Shibuya crowd to the gallery, which stayed open until the wee hours.

Nanzuka, who was 26 years old at the time, has referred to the chaotic scene as ‘just young kids doing a shit gallery.’ Based on those ragged beginnings, Nanzuka might have been underestimated by some art world longtimers. But doubters have long since been proven wrong.

He built his reputation by spearheading the art world’s reevaluation of Japanese pop artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Notable among them is the late Keiichi Tanaami, whose vivid, sexually uninhibited images rocketed him to popularity as an illustrator and graphic designer during the psychedelic era of the 1960s. But Tanaami was largely unknown to younger generations. ‘His works are too deep to simply dismiss as graphic design,’ Nanzuka notes. ‘I saw him as the full embodiment of postwar Japanese culture, and felt that younger people would feel his work was “real,” nothing like the sanitized historical images they’re used to seeing.’

In order to build Tanaami’s reputation, Nanzuka decided to prioritize showing his large paintings. ‘We showed him at our gallery in 2007, then at Frieze in 2010, and Art Basel in 2011. This got the attention of art professionals, primarily in Europe at first,’ he explains. This interest overseas predictably led to renewed curiosity at home, with Tanaami rapidly becoming reestablished as a major postwar Japanese artist. He died in 2024, just prior to the opening of an outstanding major retrospective of his work at Tokyo’s National Art Center.

Nanzuka has had similar success with Hajime Sorayama, whose instantly recognizable ‘sexy robot’ images continue to resonate decades after he began them in the late 1970s, and Harumi Yamaguchi, whose upbeat pop images of the 1970s and 1980s embodied a new sense of female empowerment.

The gallery’s current roster focuses on artists who straddle genres, draw inspiration from street and pop art, and explore fringe sensibilities. Among them is Haroshi, who emerged from the skateboarding world, as well as Daniel Arsham, equal parts object maker and architect. Toshio Saeki embodies the ero-guro (erotic-grotesque) sensibility of underground magazines of the 1970s. Yoshirotten is a graphic designer and art director. Tetsuya Nakamura’s work emerged from the candy-colored sensibility of custom car painting and sci-fi. Christian Rex van Minnen uses the simultaneously attractive and repulsive visual vocabulary of tattoos.

‘A key word for me that guides our gallery’s approach is “hirogari” – expanding,’ Nanzuka says. ‘To widen what is seen and shown.’ He elaborates, ‘It’s an intellectual process of “uncovering” and questioning what should be considered valid, culturally valuable art.’ One outcome of this has been the rethinking of what an art venue should be.

Asked what motivated him to open Nanzuka Taken — a new bar in Shibuya designed by Shinji Nanzuka himself and featuring furniture by Tetsuya Nakamura, as well as works by gallery artists including Sorayama, Harumi Yamaguchi, and Daniel Arsham — he explains: ‘It’s boring to go to somewhere where you just look at art. It’s more interesting to have an environment where you can drink, talk, and also look at art. Like a salon, maybe continuing the role played by artist bars and cafés long ago.’ In the same vein, the Snarkitecture-designed Michelin-star restaurant Sushi Saito Hanare Nanzuka in Tokyo’s Nakameguro functions as a gallery in the daytime, while the recently closed Nanzuka 2G integrated a sleek and compact contemporary art gallery into a shop selling high-end art figurines.

Nanzuka’s most ambitious venture to date, however, is the Nanzuka Art Institute, a large new museum-style art space that opened in Shanghai in November, 2024. ‘The Chinese audience is very thirsty for new ideas,’ Nanzuka explains, ‘so it’s really interesting to do exhibitions for them. The Nanzuka Art Institute is conceived of as a new kind of art institution shaped by the emerging needs of current Chinese society.’ ‘As always,’ he says with a smile, ‘I am looking backwards as well as forwards.’