25 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

Swiss-born Urs Fischer has built an international reputation through a practice that destabilises conventional distinctions between permanence and decay, authenticity and illusion, and high art and popular culture, often through works that are at once playful and disquieting.

At Fergus McCaffrey Tokyo, ‘Machigai Sagashi – Spot the Difference’ unfolds as a spatial and psychological investigation structured across two contrasting levels of the gallery. On the upper floor, a pair of monumental self-portrait sculptures, part of Fischer’s ‘Candle’ series, stand in mirrored rooms, slowly melting over the course of the exhibition. Their gradual deformation, culminating in eventual recasting, stages a cycle of dissolution and renewal that resists fixed identity.

Below, the sub-basement transforms into an immersive environment of visual disorientation. Walls, floors and ceilings are enveloped in a Rorschach-like pattern of holes and repairs, while bronze sculptures and drawings invite viewers to decipher subtle variations, echoing the titular game.

Blending conceptual rigor with absurdity, the exhibition probes the instability of perception and the fragmented nature of the self, inviting viewers into a shifting field where meaning is constantly in flux.

From April 7 to July 26, the National Film Archive of Japan explores the creative intersection between cinema and graphic design with ‘The Art of Film Posters in Japan: Revisited’. While film posters in Japan were traditionally produced anonymously under the control of studios and distributors, many stand out today as striking works of graphic art in their own right.

Revisiting a landmark exhibition first held in 2012, the show incorporates newly acquired works and brings together more than 90 posters produced mainly between the 1960s and the 1980s, a period of profound innovation in Japanese visual culture.

The exhibition traces the evolution of the medium across four thematic sections. Early post-war posters, often painted in a dramatic illustrative style, reveal how artists sought to capture the emotional essence of films. By the 1960s, a new generation of designers, including Kiyoshi Awazu, Tadanori Yokoo and Makoto Wada, began to challenge conventional promotional aesthetics with bold experimentation. A decisive turning point came with the emergence of the Art Theatre Guild in the 1960s, which encouraged collaborations between filmmakers and avant-garde designers.

Through these vivid and sometimes surprising images, the exhibition reveals another face of Japanese cinema – one that flourished beyond the screen, transforming the humble ad poster into an expressive and enduring art form.

The Tokyo National Museum presents this rare opportunity to discover one of Europe’s finest collections of Japanese narrative art. On view until July 20, the exhibition brings together 25 exceptional works seldom seen outside Ireland, celebrating a remarkable cultural dialogue between Japan and the Chester Beatty museum in Dublin.

The collection was assembled by Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, whose fascination with Japanese art began after his visit to Japan in 1917. Today, his holdings of illustrated handscrolls and picture books rank among the most important outside the country. Organised around five themes, the exhibition explores the richness of Japanese storytelling traditions, from courtly romances and heroic chronicles to folktales, supernatural worlds and poetic reflections on nature.

Among the highlights is Song of Lasting Sorrow by Kano Sansetsu, a lavishly illustrated 17th-century masterpiece depicting the tragic love story of Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei. Also featured are magnificent scrolls of The Tale of Genji, rare depictions of the warrior-monk Benkei, dramatic demon-slaying narratives such as Shutendoji and works inspired by medieval performance traditions.

The exhibition culminates with extraordinary visions of the natural world, including a rare version of On a Riverboat Journey by Ito Jakuchu. Together, these treasures reveal the extraordinary breadth of Japanese pictorial storytelling while highlighting more than a century of cultural exchange between two island nations.

Hiroko Koshino has stood at the forefront of Japanese fashion for more than half a century. Born in Osaka in 1937, she first gained attention while studying at Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College, where she won first prize in a prestigious design competition. Since opening her haute couture atelier in her home town in 1964, Koshino has built an international career, presenting collections in Tokyo, Rome, Paris and Shanghai. Known for her bold silhouettes and experimental spirit, she has expanded the boundaries of fashion through collaborations across art, music and design.

‘(Un)known Hiroko Koshino’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo reexamines the designer’s vast body of work from a contemporary perspective. Drawing on creations spanning more than five decades, the exhibition explores how Koshino has responded to shifting social conditions and cultural contexts while continually reinventing herself.

Moving beyond familiar images of brand identity, the show highlights Koshino as an artist driven by critical inquiry. Garments, artworks and archival materials reveal the breadth of her creative practice, which extends to painting, calligraphy and ceramics.

The exhibition also features works produced by children participating in the Kids’ Fashion Project, part of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Next Creation Program. By bringing together professional and emerging creativity, the exhibition celebrates fashion as a living, evolving cultural expression.

Gallery Koyanagi in Ginza presents a new series of collages by Christian Marclay, a pioneering figure in experimental music. Having started out using turntables and vinyl records as instruments before extending his practice into video, collage and installation, the California-born artist’s work interrogates how we perceive, construct and remember sound.

Placing auditory experience at the centre of visual form, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery comes on the 40th anniversary of his first visit to Japan and continues Marclay’s long-standing engagement with sampling and recomposition.

The exhibited works draw on fragments of popular culture – magazines, record sleeves, film imagery – reassembled through processes of cutting, layering and omission. In the Concentric Listening series, faces are reduced to hollow outlines, their ears preserved as points of entry into an otherwise absent interior. These nested forms ripple outward, suggesting listening as a cumulative, resonant act. Elsewhere, Oculi (Listening Trio) transforms record sleeves into apertures through which partial images emerge.

In Marclay’s hands, collage becomes more than a technique: it operates as a metaphor for perception itself, where meaning arises through fragments, overlaps and echoes.

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) forged a singular path apart from the dominant movements of his time. While abstract expressionism, pop art and neo-Dada reshaped post-war American art, Wyeth turned inward, devoting his life to depicting the people and landscapes surrounding his homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. His meticulously rendered paintings, often executed in tempera and watercolour, transcend realism to reveal the quiet poetry of solitude, memory and introspection.

Marking the 100th anniversary of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ‘Boundaries or Windows’ is the first major retrospective of Wyeth’s work in Japan since the artist’s death. The exhibition explores one of his most persistent motifs: the boundary, embodied by windows, doors and thresholds that separate interior and exterior worlds, yet invite reflection on the spaces between life and death, self and nature, and perception and imagination.

Over ten works, including Winter Fields (1942, from the Whitney Museum of American Art), Cooling Shed (1953, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Departure Party (1984, Philbrook Museum of Art), will be shown in Japan for the first time. The long-awaited exhibition offers an intimate look into the spiritual and emotional landscapes of one of the most celebrated American realist painters of the 20th century.

Often celebrated as a pivotal bridge between Realism and Impressionism, Eugène Boudin remains one of the most quietly influential figures in nineteenth-century French art. Born in 1824, Boudin was among the first artists to embrace en plein air painting, capturing fleeting effects of light and atmosphere with remarkable immediacy. His luminous depictions of skies, coastlines and rural life, particularly in his native Normandy, would profoundly shape the vision of younger painters including Claude Monet.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the Sompo Museum of Art, ‘Eugène Boudin’ brings together approximately 100 works, offering the first major retrospective of the artist in Japan in nearly three decades. While Boudin is best known for his marine scenes, the exhibition broadens this perspective, highlighting his depictions of figures, architecture and pastoral life.

Through oil paintings, drawings, pastels and prints, the exhibition traces Boudin’s sustained engagement with the changing conditions of nature. His ability to render transient moments emerges as central to his practice. By revisiting Boudin beyond the familiar framework of Impressionist precursor, the exhibition offers a nuanced reassessment of his role in the development of modern landscape painting.

Step into a world of vibrant chrysanthemums this spring at this free collaborative exhibition between teamLab and Galaxy. Now in its fifth year, the interactive, immersive space at Galaxy Harajuku uses cutting-edge projection mapping to depict flowers caught in an endless cycle of birth and death. Reach out to touch them and they’ll wither; stand still beside them and they’ll bloom more quickly.

Look down and you’ll see flowing currents of gold beneath your feet – traces shaped by your very presence. The movements of others create their own currents, which intertwine and form swirling vortices. The result is a constantly shifting environment where no two moments are ever the same. The Galaxy store also invites visitors to capture these fleeting scenes using the foldable smartphones available at the venue.

Dividing his time between Tokyo and New York, Kota Iguchi (b. 1984) has emerged as a leading figure redefining the relationship between graphic design, motion and immersive visual experience. As co-founder of the creative association CEKAI, he has developed a practice that moves fluidly between motion graphics, live-action film, spatial installations and large-scale digital environments. From the animated sports pictograms of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to projects for Las Vegas’s Sphere, Iguchi demonstrates how graphic language can evolve beyond flat surfaces.

This summer, Ginza Graphic Gallery explores the artist’s dynamic visual universe with ‘Kota Iguchi: Motion Graphics’. The exhibition examines how typography, geometry, paper and physical movement can interact and unfold across time and space.

For the occasion, Iguchi has collaborated with artists Rei Ishii, Ryu Mieno and Taku Sasaki/Aki Kanai on three newly commissioned works exploring the intersections of geometric structures, bodily expression and sequential forms. Installed on the gallery’s ground floor, these projects trace the transformation of graphic ideas into sculptural and animated experiences.

Meanwhile, the basement space surveys landmark works by Iguchi and CEKAI, highlighting the growing role of immersive visual communication in contemporary culture. Blending motion, architecture and graphic experimentation, the exhibition offers a compelling glimpse into the future of design as a spatial and sensory experience.

Over a single decade at the end of the 19th century, Vincent van Gogh produced an oeuvre of remarkable intensity, transforming personal struggle into a radical visual language defined by expressive colour and vigorous brushwork. Though largely unrecognised during his lifetime, his paintings now stand among the most studied and admired in the history of art.

From May to August 2026, the Ueno Royal Museum offers a focused exploration of the artist’s formative years. Composed entirely of works from the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the artist’s native Netherlands, one of the world’s most important repositories of Van Gogh’s art, this exhibition traces his development from early influences to the luminous breakthroughs of his Arles period.

Beginning with the Barbizon and Hague schools, whose naturalism and spiritual engagement with rural life left a deep imprint on the young painter, the exhibition follows Van Gogh’s early Dutch period, marked by somber tonalities and a profound empathy for peasant life. It then moves to Paris, where encounters with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists catalysed a dramatic shift in his palette and technique.

The exhibition culminates in Arles, the coastal city in southern France where Van Gogh’s mature style emerged in full force. The highlight is the celebrated Night Café Terrace (Place du Forum), a work that captures the artist’s fascination with artificial light and nocturnal atmosphere. Radiant and immersive, it signals his decisive embrace of colour as an expressive force.

As the first chapter of a two-part exhibition series (the second is scheduled for 2027–2028), the presentation offers both an art-historical survey and a meditation on artistic perseverance. In revisiting Van Gogh’s early trajectory, it invites viewers to reconsider the origins of a vision that would ultimately redefine modern painting.

Note that admission is free for high school students and younger until June 30.

Suzuko Yamada is among the most compelling younger voices reshaping contemporary Japanese architecture. Known for spaces in which structures, objects, vegetation and human movement seem to collide and resonate rather than quietly harmonise, Yamada approaches architecture as a living environment charged with tension, rhythm and improvisation. ‘Parallel Tunes’ at Toto Gallery Ma is her first solo exhibition.

The show introduces Yamada’s vision of architecture as polyphony – a vibrant field in which multiple forms, textures and functions assert themselves simultaneously. Stairs that zigzag across voids, curtains that descend like theatrical gestures, bookshelves that stretch across floors and unexpected bursts of colour all become independent ‘voices’ within a larger spatial composition. This sensibility was already evident in her acclaimed residence daita2019, and has since expanded into increasingly ambitious public works, including a rest facility for Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai.

At Gallery Ma, Yamada transforms the exhibition into an environment rather than a retrospective display. Drawings, models, installations and spatial interventions evoke a world where nature, living beings, landscape and manufactured forms echo against one another in restless coexistence. Richly animated and defiantly unbalanced, ‘Parallel Tunes’ suggests that architecture today may be less about imposing order and more about orchestrating the noisy vitality of life itself.

Marking a century since the birth of one of the most remarkable people Shimane prefecture has ever produced, the National Art Center, Tokyo celebrates world-renowned fashion designer Hanae Mori with this extensive retrospective, the first such exhibition to be held after Mori’s death in 2022.

A comprehensive look at Mori’s astonishing career in high fashion, which took her from one of the most rural corners of Japan to the hallowed halls of Parisian haute couture, the exhibition showcases its protagonist’s signature East-meets-West style and her dedication to traditional Japanese materials and techniques.

Some 400 items, from Mori’s iconic butterfly-adorned dresses to photographs and personal belongings, are used to illustrate the designer’s life, convictions and philosophy of the ‘vital type’ – a vibrant, dedicated and forward-looking woman, reflecting her own approach to life. What emerges is the image of not only a brilliant fashion trailblazer, but also that of a pioneering professional whose example inspired a generation of women during Japan’s period of rapid postwar economic growth.

Window manufacturer YKK AP teams up with a number of prestigious Spanish institutions to highlight a small but crucial detail of Antoni Gaudí’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Zooming in on the role apertures played in the Catalan visionary’s singular architectural language, which was defined by organic forms, intricate ornament and a profound understanding of structure and light, ‘Windows on the Future’ forms part of a wider research initiative examining Gaudí’s creative methods.

Organised to mark the centenary of Gaudí’s death, the exhibition at 21_21 Design Sight shares its concept with a more extensive presentation at Barcelona’s Palau Güell, a UNESCO World Heritage site, adapting it to the design-focused environment of Gallery 3. Through models, research materials and visual documentation, visitors are invited to explore Gaudí’s enduring ideas and consider how his inventive thinking may inspire the windows, and architecture, of the future.

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, photographs and films by Gautier Deblonde offer a glimpse into Mueck’s studio practice, revealing the quiet rigour behind some of contemporary art’s most affecting works.

Robert Longo has long turned the visual noise of contemporary life into images of monumental intensity. Best known for his hyperreal charcoal drawings that magnify the political, cultural and emotional charge of mass-media imagery, the New York-based artist has spent four decades probing the fractures beneath American power, spectacle and mythology. Now, after an absence of thirty years, he returns to Japan with ‘Angels of the Maelstrom’, on view at Pace Gallery Tokyo until June 17.

This new solo exhibition gathers recent drawings and sculptures shaped by Longo’s enduring dialogue between Japan and the US. Across Pace’s two floors, allegorical images of crashing waves, submerged whales, tigers, mountains and blooming peonies unfold beside portraits of 20th-century American icons, creating a charged visual field where natural force and historical memory collide. At the centre stands Untitled (American Samurai), a monumental depiction of Shohei Ohtani, whom Longo sees as a living emblem of cultural convergence: a Japanese athlete redefining America’s national pastime.

The exhibition’s title draws on Angelus Novus, Paul Klee’s haunting image of an angel suspended between surrender and flight, later interpreted by Walter Benjamin as history’s helpless witness. Longo adopts this figure as a lens through which to view the present maelstrom of violence, media saturation and uncertain futures.

Born in Kolkata in 1963 and now based in New York, Rina Banerjee has established herself as a singular voice in the global contemporary art scene. Drawing from her experience of migration and diasporic identity, Banerjee creates intricate, richly layered sculptures and installations out of everyday materials like cotton threads, feathers, shells and glass chandeliers. Her practice, informed by both engineering training and fine art education at Yale, navigates the intersections of postcolonial history, feminism and global exchange, often infusing critical perspectives with a subtle, disarming sense of humour.

‘You made me leave home…’ at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is an exhibition of 19 works drawn from the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Organised as part of the foundation’s ‘Hors-les-murs’ programme, which brings major artworks to venues around the world, the exhibition marks both the 20th anniversary of the Espace Louis Vuitton and a decade of the ‘Hors-les-murs’ initiative.

Spanning installation, sculpture and painting, the exhibition foregrounds Banerjee’s ongoing exploration of migration, colonial legacies and the circulation of people and objects. At its core is the monumental installation In an unnatural storm… (2008), presented publicly for the first time by the Fondation. Suspended from the ceiling in a cascading constellation of forms, the work evokes both the wonder and instability of global journeys, drawing inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

Alongside this, recent works such as Black Noodles (2023) and a new 2025 painting series extend Banerjee’s inquiry into identity as fluid, hybrid and transnational. Blending references to Indian miniature painting, Chinese silk traditions and Mesoamerican imagery, her compositions oscillate between abstraction and figuration, often conjuring enigmatic female figures reminiscent of reimagined goddesses.

Through its sensuous materiality and conceptual depth, ‘You made me leave home…’ offers a compelling meditation on displacement and belonging.

The Tokyo Station Gallery presents the first major exhibition in Japan to feature the works of Swiss artist Karl Walser (1877–1943), who built a multifaceted career that spanned painting, illustration, book design and stage production. Bringing together approximately 150 pieces, many shown for the first time, the retrospective is especially notable for its focus on the time Walser spent in Japan.

Closely associated with the Modernist Berlin Secession movement, Walser’s art blends the somber tonalities of fin-de-siècle aesthetics with refined, luminous colour, producing images marked by an enduring sense of mystery. Long overshadowed by his younger brother, the writer Robert Walser, his oeuvre is now receiving renewed scholarly and public attention.

The exhibition traces Walser’s evolution from his early Symbolist-inflected paintings and Jugendstil-inspired drawings to his prolific output as an illustrator and designer for major literary figures. But its most compelling part highlights the artist’s 1908 journey to Japan, undertaken during a period of personal crisis. Travelling through Tokyo, Kyoto and Miyazu, Walser produced a remarkable body of watercolours and sketches depicting festivals, landscapes and everyday scenes. Rarely exhibited, these works stand out for their vivid chromatic sensitivity and documentary value.

Further sections explore his collaborations in theatre and mural painting, revealing an artist whose practice consistently bridged visual art, literature and performance, and whose vision continues to resonate across disciplines.

Did you even have a childhood if you didn’t turn the hole-punched pages of The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Originally published in 1969, this children’s classic will be celebrated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, marking 50 years since the book’s Japanese release (Japan was the first place the beloved caterpillar ever appeared in print).

Prepare to feast your eyes upon 180 objects – all bursting with bold bright colours, playful patterns and Eric Carle’s specially curated collages. Over 27 picture books will also feature, offering a deep dive into the ingenuity of Carle’s imagination. The late American author and illustrator was famed for his fresh take on storytelling; simple shapes are layered with textured hand-painted tissue paper, resulting in whimsical works that were deceptively clever and remain iconic to this day.

Held at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, this ambitious exhibition reconsiders surrealism as a far-reaching cultural force that has reshaped both art and everyday life.

Defined by André Breton in 1924 as a practice grounded in the ‘omnipotence of dreams’ and the pursuit of a ‘superior reality’, surrealism drew deeply on Freudian psychoanalysis to unlock the subconscious. While its dreamlike imagery and unsettling juxtapositions are widely recognised in painting and photography, the exhibition reveals how surrealist thinking extended far beyond the gallery, infiltrating advertising, fashion and interior design.

Organised into six thematic sections, the show traces the movement’s expansion across media, examining how techniques such as automatism, collage and dépaysement (‘disorientation’) transformed both visual culture and lived environments.

Masterpieces by leading figures of the genre, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Man Ray and Giorgio de Chirico, are shown alongside rare objects, posters, photographs and design works. Highlights include Magritte’s ‘The Museum of the King’, Elsa Schiaparelli’s iconic fashion designs, and striking examples of surrealist advertising and interiors. Drawing on major collections throughout Japan, the exhibition offers a timely reappraisal of surrealism’s enduring power to unsettle reality – and reimagine it.

Enter the imaginative realm of Japanese mythology this spring at Warehouse Terrada’s digital art exhibit. The humorous yokai figures here, brought to life using cutting-edge 3D graphics and projection mapping technology, are demons, spirits and supernatural monsters from ancient folklore.

Expect to see yokai monsters from artworks such as ‘Hyakki Yagyo Emaki’ and ‘Hyakumonogatari’, as well as realistically recreated oni ogres, tengu goblins, duck-like kappa river monsters, and tsukumogami spirits that seemingly appear right in front of you. While you’re there, don’t miss the exhibit of actual ukiyo-e prints of yokai by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, or the detailed explanations of Edo-period (1603–1868) and Meiji-era (1868–1912) yokai paintings, made possible through cooperation with historians of the Nishio City Iwase Bunko antiquarian book museum and Shodoshima’s Yokai Art Museum.

Tickets are now on sale via Rakuten Travel Experiences, KKDay, Klook, Lawson Ticket and Trip.com.

Prepare your ponchos and panniers, as Harajuku J-fashion icon Sebastian Masuda has opened his first large-scale solo exhibition in years in Hyper Museum Hanno. The exhibition, running from March 14 to August 30, is packed with psychedelic candy-coloured installation rooms, art pieces and sculptures by Masuda himself, created over the years and brought to Japan for the event.

The exhibition unfolds across six themed spaces presented in a loose chronology, tracing Masuda’s formative experiences and how he arrived at his own understanding of kawaii after navigating personal conflicts.

While it’s taking place a bit outside central Tokyo, the exhibition offers an approachable but deep dive into Harajuku kawaii while prompting a look at where the culture is headed next. Be sure to visit the museum pop-up shop, which stocks exclusive T-shirts, stickers, omamori amulets and more.

Tickets are now on sale via Asoview, Artsticker, Lawson Ticket and Seven Ticket.

Donald Judd was one of the most decisive figures of twentieth-century art; an artist whose rigorous thinking reshaped the conditions under which art is made and experienced. Emerging from painting in the early 1960s, Judd developed three-dimensional works that rejected illusion and hierarchy, insisting instead on clarity, material presence and spatial integrity.

Beyond form, he was equally concerned with context: how, where and for how long a work should exist. His writings, architectural projects and advocacy for permanent installations reveal an artist for whom art could never be separated from its environment.

The Watari-Um’s ‘Judd | Marfa’ traces its protagonist’s radical vision through the lens of his life and work in Marfa, Texas. After leaving New York in the 1970s, Judd transformed former military and industrial buildings in the remote desert town into sites for the permanent installation of his own work and that of artists including Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain. These spaces, later formalised through the Chinati Foundation, remain preserved as Judd intended.

The exhibition brings together early paintings from the 1950s, key three-dimensional works from the 1960s to the 1990s, and extensive archival materials (drawings, plans, videos and documents) that illuminate Judd’s conception of Marfa as a total environment for art, architecture and living.

A special section revisits The Sculpture of Donald Judd (1978), organised by museum founder Shizuko Watari, underscoring the museum’s long-standing engagement with Judd’s legacy. Together, these materials articulate Judd’s enduring conviction that the installation of art is inseparable from its meaning.

Katsushika Hokusai is all the rage in Tokyo. Last year saw several acclaimed exhibitions dive into the ukiyo-e master’s ginormous oeuvre, and the Edo native’s iconic art has also been the subject of some pretty remarkable reinterpretations lately.

Next up in highlighting the printmaking genius is the National Museum of Western Art, whose exhibition ‘Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji from the Iuchi Collection’ marks the first public unveiling of this remarkable group of works placed on deposit at the museum in 2024.

The exhibition showcases all 46 prints from Hokusai’s iconic series Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji (c. 1830–33), alongside two additional impressions of his most beloved masterpieces, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (commonly known as ‘The Great Wave’) and Clear Day with a Southern Breeze (known as ‘Red Fuji’). You can look forward to exceptionally well-preserved impressions, including a rare indigo-printed ‘Blue Fuji’ version of Clear Day with a Southern Breeze.

Bringing together all 48 works, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience Hokusai’s enduring vision of Mt Fuji within Japan’s premier museum of Western art – a fitting setting for appreciating his art’s timeless dialogue between East and West.

The historic Shiseido Gallery presents a tribute to the visionary graphic designer Masayoshi Nakajo. Five years after his passing, the exhibition revisits Nakajo’s long and influential relationship with the cosmetics company through around 200 works spanning more than four decades.

Nakajo played a pivotal role in shaping Shiseido’s visual culture, producing posters, packaging and advertising designs that blended playful experimentation with refined elegance. Visitors will encounter iconic graphics created for Shiseido Parlour, including biscuit packaging, wrapping papers and promotional posters, alongside original drawings shown publicly for the first time.

A central focus of the exhibition is Nakajo’s work as art director of Hanatsubaki, Shiseido’s influential cultural magazine. A special reading corner allows visitors to browse some 350 issues published between 1982 and 2011, offering insight into his distinctive editorial approach, where typography, illustration and photography interact in dynamic visual rhythms.

Known for his free-hand compositions and intuitive use of form, Nakajo once said he always chose ‘the design most likely to sing’. This exhibition captures that spirit, where letters become melody, images move like choreography, and graphic design reveals its expressive, almost musical potential.

Hirohiko Araki began serialising JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1986, launching a saga that has since spanned decades, generations of protagonists and shifting aesthetic paradigms. Renowned for its flamboyant characters, bold compositions and philosophical undercurrents, JoJo stands apart for its synthesis of classical art, fashion, music and pop culture. With cumulative circulation exceeding 120 million copies, the series has become a global phenomenon, while Araki himself has become recognised as a singular figure bridging manga and contemporary art.

From January 8 to June 28, the Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage Tokyo Gallery presents this three-part exhibition that foregrounds Araki’s work through the lens of fine-art printmaking. The exhibition has previously been shown in San Francisco and Kyoto, but this marks the first time Araki’s lithographs and lenticular works are displayed in Tokyo.

To allow visitors to encounter as wide a variety of works as possible, the exhibition unfolds in three rotations: Part 1 (January 8–February 23), Part 2 (March 3–April 19) and Part 3 (April 28–June 28). At the heart of the display are nine lithographic prints, produced in 2025 at the request of Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage and representing Araki’s first foray into lithography. Unlike conventional manga printing, which reduces drawings to stark black-and-white data, lithography preserves the artist’s hand with remarkable fidelity. Drawing directly onto metal plates with lithographic pencils and chalk, Araki has embraced the medium’s irreversibility: lines cannot be erased, lending each mark a palpable tension and decisiveness.

The resulting prints, featuring figures such as Jotaro Kujo and Dio, reveal a new intimacy with Araki’s lines, from the controlled force of slow strokes to the rhythmic energy of rapid shading. Each work is produced in an edition of 100, printed by master lithographer Satoru Itazu.

Complementing these are lenticular works depicting protagonists from Parts 1 through 6 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Utilising a technique with roots in early 20th-century optical experimentation, these prints create the illusion of depth and motion, activated only through the viewer’s movement. As one shifts position, time seems to unfold within a single image – an effect that resonates with the manipulation of duration and perspective, a familiar technique in manga.

Together, the lithographic and lenticular works position JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure as an evolving artistic practice – and one that continues to expand the possibilities of manga within the broader history of visual art.