25 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

A master of immersive installations that merge video, sculpture, sound, light and language, Tony Oursler is one of the most influential multimedia artists of his generation. He’s been a pioneering figure in video projection and media-based art since the 1980s, probing the uneasy intersections between technology, psychology, belief systems and contemporary society. Drawing equally from pop culture, science, conspiracy theories, religion and the paranormal, Oursler’s work gives form to the invisible forces shaping modern life, be they data streams, surveillance or spirits, through a poetic blend of humour and unease.

‘Tony Oursler: Tech/Gnosis – Magic, Media, Art’ at Tokyo Node is the artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan, offering a comprehensive survey of Oursler’s practice from the early 1990s to the present. Key works such as Private (1994–1997), Specular (2021) and the psychologically charged installation Lock 2, 4, 6 (2010) are shown alongside previously unpublished projects and extensive archival materials drawn from Oursler’s personal collection of more than 3,000 items related to science, magic and unidentified phenomena.

A highlight is the world premiere of Empty (2000), a long-gestating collaboration with David Bowie and composer Glenn Branca, realised here for the first time. The exhibition also debuts Chimera (2026), a monumental, site-specific work conceived for Tokyo Node’s soaring 15-metre-high space, where mythical hybrid creatures appear to float above the city. In an age shaped by AI, surveillance and renewed spiritual curiosity, Oursler’s work resonates with striking urgency, challenging you to reflect on how belief, technology and imagination entwine.

From July 4 to August 26, Hikarie Hall in Shibuya invites you to reconsider the history of Japanese photography through the eyes of women artists. Presented in Japan in an expanded form following an acclaimed international tour, ‘I’m So Happy You Are Here’ brings together around 200 works by approximately 30 photographers spanning more than seven decades.

Through works ranging from post-war documentary photography to contemporary experiments with installation, collage, video and photobooks, the exhibition offers a vital counter-narrative to a photographic canon long dominated by male figures. It reveals how Japanese women photographers have consistently challenged social norms, explored identity and memory, and expanded the definition of the medium. Delicate observations of everyday life sit alongside incisive critiques of gender roles and bold formal innovation, creating a richly layered portrait of both personal and collective experience.

Featuring internationally celebrated figures such as Miyako Ishiuchi, Mao Ishikawa, Rinko Kawauchi, Tomoko Sawada and Lieko Shiga, alongside artists whose contributions have received less public recognition, the exhibition emphasises intergenerational dialogue and continuity. Curated by Mariko Takeuchi with Lesley A Martin and Pauline Vermare, the show invites audiences to rethink Japanese photographic history – and photo history at large – through a more inclusive, expansive lens.

Harajuku’s Ota Memorial Museum of Art dives into the playful, uncanny and fantastical side of ukiyo-e with ‘Animals & Monsters: Cute, Scary, and a Little Weird’. Bringing together 140 works shown across two exhibition periods, the show explores the extraordinary menagerie that populated the imagination of Edo-period (1603–1868) artists, from beloved household pets to bizarre supernatural creatures and delightfully absurd hybrids.

Cats and dogs appear throughout the exhibition as affectionate companions, while foxes, elephants and octopuses take on strangely human gestures and occupations. One highlight is the museum’s rich collection of works featuring anthropomorphic animals, including famously humorous scenes of cats relaxing in soba restaurants, bathhouses and eel shops. Elsewhere, visitors encounter charming yokai such as dancing bakeneko, alongside more unsettling figures including demons and giant spiders.

The exhibition also ventures into the delightfully irrational territory of Edo fantasy. Mythical beasts assembled from multiple zodiac animals, fish with human faces, animated medicines and coins, and tiger-stone hybrids reveal the boundless inventiveness of ukiyo-e artists and their fascination with the strange and surreal.

Around one fifth of the works on display are newly acquired pieces being shown publicly for the first time, making the exhibition appealing even to longtime followers of the museum’s celebrated yokai- and animal-themed shows. Balancing humour, horror and visual eccentricity, ‘Animals & Monsters’ offers a vivid glimpse into the playful imagination of Edo Japan.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum’s ‘Lucie Rie: Elegant Vessels Fusing East and West’ is a major retrospective dedicated to one of the most influential ceramic artists of the 20th century. Born in Vienna in 1902, Rie developed her artistic vision at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts or School of Applied Arts) before establishing herself as a ceramic artist. Forced to flee Austria in 1938, she rebuilt her life and career in London, where she created a distinctive body of work characterized by elegant wheel-thrown forms, delicate incised and inlaid decorations, and luminous glazes.

Combining precision, experimentation and extraordinary sensitivity to form, Rie’s vessels embody a rare balance of strength and grace. This exhibition marks the first large-scale survey of her work in Japan in nearly a decade and brings together outstanding examples from Japanese collections, including works from the renowned Iuchi Collection.

The exhibition traces Rie’s artistic evolution from her early years in Vienna to the height of her career in Britain. It also explores her connections with key figures such as Josef Hoffmann, Bernard Leach, Hans Coper and Shoji Hamada, revealing how dialogues between European modernism and East Asian ceramic traditions shaped her creative practice.

Presented throughout the museum’s celebrated Art Deco Main Building and Annex, the exhibition engenders a compelling conversation between Rie’s elegant vessels and the refined architecture of the former residence of Prince Asaka.

Food is one of the most universal aspects of human life, yet it’s also deeply personal, shaped by memory, place, community and social change. This summer, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum explores these connections in ‘Tomorrow’s Dining Table’, an exhibition drawn from the museum’s collection of approximately 39,000 photographic and moving-image works.

Bringing together works by fourteen artists, including Rinko Kawauchi, Ikko Narahara, Tokuko Ushioda and Tatsumi Orimoto, the exhibition examines food as a lens through which to consider human relationships and contemporary society. Structured into four thematic sections, it traces the many meanings attached to eating and sharing meals.

The opening chapter focuses on personal and family memories, presenting intimate photographic reflections on everyday dining experiences. ‘Between Food and Place’ shifts attention to the connections between food and local environments, from fishing communities to urban landscapes, highlighting how geography shapes culinary culture.

‘Within the Environment’ addresses pressing contemporary issues, including ecological change, food production and the long-term consequences of environmental disasters. The final section, ‘Tomorrow’s Dining Table’, considers the future of eating in an aging society marked by solitary living and changing social structures.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of Japan’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, whose practice spans photography, architecture and stage production. At the core of his work lies a profound engagement with analogue silver gelatin photography, a medium he has elevated through rigorous conceptual frameworks and extraordinary technical mastery, even as it faces obsolescence in the digital age.

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo now offers a major survey that traces the evolution of Sugimoto’s photographic practice from the late 1970s to the present. Featuring approximately 60 silver gelatin prints, the exhibition brings into focus a medium the artist recognises as endangered, while asking broader questions about truth, memory and time.

Structured into three chapters, the exhibition spans 13 series, from early works that established Sugimoto’s reputation to later bodies of work that probe abstraction, perception and the limits of representation. Newly unveiled pieces, including additions to the Diorama series, offer fresh insight into themes Sugimoto has pursued for more than half a century.

The exhibition’s title refers to a deeper meditation on what is disappearing from contemporary visual culture. As digital images become infinitely mutable, Sugimoto reasserts photography’s original power as a medium of evidence and presence. Through its breadth and philosophical depth, ‘Extinction’ is set to offer a rare opportunity to reflect on photography’s past, and its uncertain future, through one of its most rigorous practitioners.

When the boundless imagination of Pablo Picasso meets the vibrant creativity of Sir Paul Smith, fireworks follow. Picasso (1881–1973), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, revolutionised modern art with his radical innovations in form and colour. British designer Smith, noted for his playful approach to tailoring and his masterful sense of colour and pattern, brings his unique sensibility to the table, transforming the NACT’s galleries into a dialogue between art and fashion, and tradition and reinvention.

‘Adventure of Playful Spirits’ offers a fresh encounter with approximately 80 works from the Musée National Picasso-Paris. Following the success of the 2023 Paris exhibition ‘Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light!’, this Japan edition invites visitors to rediscover the painter’s creative evolution from his early Portrait of a Man to the tender Paulo as Harlequin, through Smith’s imaginative spatial design.

From colour-splashed walls to whimsical décor, every element of the exhibition reflects Smith’s joyful spirit and his fascination with artistic play. This meeting of two creative giants – one who shaped modern art and another who redefined contemporary design – conjures up a vibrant, immersive world where curiosity, humour and craftsmanship intertwine.

The Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo’s summer exhibition centres the café as one of the most vital laboratories of modern art. In late 19th-century Paris, cafés, cabarets and dance halls became informal studios and debating chambers, where artists such as Manet and the future Impressionists exchanged ideas, challenged conventions and distanced themselves from the authority of official salons. Art, for the first time, began to mingle with the rhythms of everyday urban life.

Through approximately 130 works, the exhibition charts how these spaces shaped new artistic sensibilities. Paintings and prints by Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and their contemporaries reveal cafés as sites of pleasure, isolation and observation – places where modernity’s contradictions came into focus. The narrative then extends beyond Paris to Barcelona, where in 1897 the Catalan artist Ramon Casas opened Els Quatre Gats (‘Four Cats’), inspired by Montmartre’s famed Chat Noir (‘Black Cat’). The café became a creative hub for a young Pablo Picasso, whose encounters with its bohemian atmosphere would feed directly into the emotional intensity of his Blue Period.

A particular highlight is Casas’s Madeleine, a masterpiece shown in Japan for the first time in 35 years. Together, the works illuminate how the café functioned as a catalyst for some of the most enduring innovations in modern art.

From June 20 to July 20, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum showcases the winning works from one of the world’s most prestigious international photography competitions. Since its launch in 2007, the Sony World Photography Awards has championed photographers at every stage of their careers, providing a global platform for both emerging talent and established practitioners while celebrating the diversity and vitality of contemporary photographic practice.

This Tokyo presentation adopts the thematic concept developed for the exhibition’s debut at Somerset House in London. Visitors are invited to engage with the award-winning photographs through three interconnected narratives: Absence, which reflects on memory, loss and erasure; Humans in the Stories, focusing on the immediacy and complexity of lived experience; and Conflicted Territories, examining borders, divisions and the political and social tensions that shape today’s world. By placing the works in dialogue with one another, the exhibition encourages viewers to consider broader global issues through photography’s uniquely evocative visual language.

A special highlight is a presentation of works by Joel Meyerowitz, recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award. Widely regarded as one of the pioneers of colour street photography, Meyerowitz has profoundly influenced the evolution of the medium through his luminous explorations of urban life, light and everyday experience. Displayed alongside this year’s award-winning projects, his photographs create a compelling conversation between the history of modern photography and its most current international expressions. Free to the public, the exhibition offers a timely overview of the diverse perspectives shaping contemporary photography across the world.

On view at the Nezu Museum until July 12, this exhibition invites visitors to look beyond images and discover the often-overlooked role that writing plays in East Asian art. As the latest installment in the museum’s acclaimed ‘Introduction to Traditional Art’ series, the display offers an accessible exploration of how words, inscriptions, signatures and seals enrich the meaning of paintings, calligraphy and decorative arts.

While many visitors may feel intimidated by works centred on calligraphy, this exhibition shifts the focus to writing embedded within artworks themselves. Through a carefully selected group of masterpieces, it reveals how inscriptions can serve as records of authorship, expressions of literary culture, markers of ownership, or integral visual elements within a composition.

Highlights include the Important Cultural Property Sparrows on Bamboo (on view until June 21), attributed to the 13th-century Chinese master Muqi, which demonstrates the importance of signatures, seals and collectors’ marks in tracing an artwork’s history. The celebrated Landscape, Known as Koten-en’i (on view until June 21), attributed to the 15th-century painter Shubun and accompanied by inscriptions from multiple Zen priests, illustrates the close relationship between painting and poetry in medieval Japan. Visitors can also discover works in which waka poems are woven directly into painted landscapes, as well as remarkable Buddhist images composed entirely of sutra characters.

By illuminating the many ways writing functions within works of art, the exhibition offers fresh insights into pre-modern Japanese and East Asian culture. Elegant, educational and richly rewarding, it encourages visitors to see text as a gateway to deeper appreciation and understanding.

A visionary who worked along the boundaries between art, design and everyday life, Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Italian design. Rising to prominence in the 1950s through his groundbreaking work for the typewriter and computer manufacturer Olivetti, Sottsass redefined industrial design by infusing functional objects with emotion, symbolism and wit. His restless creative spirit culminated in the 1981 founding of the Memphis Group, an international collective whose bold colours, playful forms and radical aesthetics came to define post-modern design and reshape global visual culture.

‘Design begins where magic begins’ at the Artizon Museum is the first comprehensive retrospective of Sottsass’s work in Japan. Drawing from the Ishibashi Foundation’s extensive collection, the exhibition brings together 112 works spanning the entirety of its subject’s long and prolific career, from early experiments to later, more philosophical creations.

Through furniture, industrial design and conceptual works, the exhibition traces Sottsass’s lifelong challenge to strict rationalism and his belief that design should reflect the emotional and spiritual dimensions of human life. Humour, colour and sensuality emerge as tools with which he sought to illuminate the lived experiences, desires and contradictions of modern society. Offering a rare opportunity to encounter Sottsass’s work in depth, the exhibition reveals a visionary who insisted that true design begins with imagination and magic.

Daniel Buren has spent more than six decades questioning where an artwork begins and where the surrounding world enters into it. Internationally renowned for his unmistakable 8.7cm vertical stripes, the French artist has transformed this seemingly neutral motif into a rigorous conceptual tool, using it to expose the architectural, historical and symbolic conditions of every site he inhabits. This spring and summer, Scai Piramide in Roppongi presents ‘Situated Works 1966-2013’, a rare survey spanning nearly fifty years of his practice.

The exhibition traces Buren’s evolution from his early, radical interventions of the 1960s to luminous optical-fiber works produced in the 2010s. Historical pieces such as Peinture aux formes variables reveal the moment when the striped industrial fabric first became his defining visual language, while the Five Elements paintings, originally created for a 1989 exhibition in Nagoya, demonstrate his persistent dismantling of expressive authorship and painterly convention.

In later galleries, Buren expands this inquiry through works integrating LED-lit optical fibers, where colour and light become spatial phenomena rather than fixed surfaces. Their shimmering presence underscores the artist’s long-held conviction that colour is the irreducible core of visual experience. Deeply connected to Japan, Buren here appears as an artist whose disciplined investigations continue to sharpen our perception of space itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.