15 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

A spectacular journey through the mysteries of an ancient civilisation arrives in Tokyo this autumn with ‘Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru’, held from November 22 2025 to March 1 2026 at the Mori Arts Center Gallery. Making its highly anticipated Asian debut, the exhibition has already captivated over 540,000 visitors across four cities worldwide since its 2021 premiere at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.

Endorsed by the Peruvian government, the exhibition features approximately 130 artefacts on loan from Lima’s renowned Larco Museum, many of which are being displayed in Japan for the first time. Highlights include opulent gold adornments unearthed from royal tombs and sacred ritual items used in ancient temples, offering an intimate look at the artistry and spiritual life of the Andean civilisations.

Visitors can also experience an immersive recreation of Machu Picchu, the iconic city in the clouds, realised with cutting-edge digital technology. The exhibition’s narrative centres on the mythic hero Aiapæc, inviting audiences on an intellectual and emotional adventure through history, legend and archaeological wonder.

Visionary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) transformed the landscape of modern architecture through his organic forms, bold innovations and deep reverence for nature. His iconic works, including Park Güell, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà and, above all, the Sagrada Família, remain enduring testaments to his genius, blending mathematics and faith into living architecture. Today, seven of his masterpieces are recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s passing and the completion of the Sagrada Família’s main tower, ‘Naked meets Gaudí’ at Warehouse Terrada offers a groundbreaking fusion of art, technology and scholarship. In official collaboration with the Gaudí Foundation, the immersive exhibition unveils Gaudí’s personal notebooks, letters, architectural tools and original blueprints, many on display for the first time worldwide.

Through cutting-edge projection, participatory installations and interactive experiences, visitors are invited to step inside Gaudí’s creative universe; to touch, feel and co-create the harmony of nature and architecture that defined his vision. Bridging a century of imagination, the exhibition celebrates Gaudí as an architect of stone, but also as a designer of dreams, whose spirit continues to shape the future of art and design.

Celebrating three decades of Ghost in the Shell, one of Japan’s most influential sci-fi franchises, this large-scale exhibition takes over Tokyo Node at Toranomon Hills from January 30 to April 5. The ambitious showcase traces the evolution of the series from Masamune Shirow’s ground-breaking 1989 manga to its acclaimed anime adaptations and, with a new 2026 series from Science Saru on the horizon, into the future.

Organised with the full cooperation of Production IG, the studio behind the franchise’s animation, the exhibition brings together works by directors Mamoru Oshii, Kenji Kamiyama, Kazuya Kise and Shinji Aramaki, offering visitors an unprecedented deep dive into the cyberpunk universe that redefined anime.

Over 600 production materials are on display, including original drawings, storyboards and concept art. You can also look forward to immersive installations and interactive exhibits that explore key philosophical themes from the series such as identity, consciousness and the boundaries between human and machine.

Further highlights include new contributions by international artists, exclusive interview footage, and the ‘DIG-ru’ installation, which invites visitors to ‘digitally excavate’ the world of Ghost in the Shell. And of course, you get to shop for plenty of only-here merchandise at the gift shop.

Kicking off its centennial, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum presents this landmark exhibition that brings to Japan, for the first time on such a scale, masterpieces from the golden age of Swedish painting.

In the late 19th century, a generation of Swedish artists traveled to France, where they absorbed the spirit of Realism and the plein-air traditions flourishing in Paris. Returning home, they turned their gaze towards the landscapes, people and quiet rhythms of everyday life in Sweden. Their works, infused with intimacy and lyricism, gave form to a distinctly Swedish artistic identity, one that celebrated the interplay of northern light, nature and human presence.

Organised in close collaboration with the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the exhibition features a rich selection of paintings created between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Together, they reveal the sensibilities of a culture deeply shaped by its environment and its search for national expression.

Entry to the exhibition is free for college students on weekdays between January 27 and February 20.

Adapted from Tatsuki Fujimoto’s celebrated manga, the anime film Look Back (2024) is a quiet yet piercing meditation on creativity, loss and the fragile resolve that drives manga artists to keep drawing despite uncertainty.

Directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, one of contemporary Japan’s most respected animators, the cinematic adaptation stood out for its emotional restraint and the expressive power of its hand-drawn lines. The Fukushima-born Oshiyama has built a multifaceted career as an animator, director and designer, contributing to landmark works such as Den-noh Coil before setting up his own company, Studio Durian. For Look Back, he assumed nearly every key creative role, shaping a deeply personal tribute to drawing itself.

This exhibition at Azabudai Hills Gallery offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of the film. Instead of presenting Look Back as a completed work, the display traces its making through original key animations, character sheets, memos and an immersive ‘tunnel’ of drawings suspended from the ceiling that foreground the physical labour of animation. Carefully recreated spaces from the story invite visitors to step inside the emotional geography of the work.

Other highlights include the first public presentation in Japan of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s original sketches for Look Back, newly created manga drawn by Oshiyama for the exhibition, and a special dialogue display with Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki. Together, these elements form a moving reflection on why, even in an age of automation, the human impulse to draw, and to leave imperfect lines behind, still matters.

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is counted among the most influential figures in postwar American art. Emerging in the 1960s amid the rise of minimalism and conceptual art, LeWitt replaced the emotional expressionism of earlier generations with a rigorous focus on systems, structures and ideas. His works, from modular ‘structures’ based on cubes to his celebrated Wall Drawings, transformed how art could be made, perceived and even authored. As he famously wrote in his 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, ‘The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.’

‘Open Structure’ is the first major public museum survey of the artist’s work in Japan. Spanning wall drawings, sculptures, works on paper and artist’s books, the exhibition traces LeWitt’s lifelong pursuit of an art of pure thought and open form. Six wall drawings, realised by local teams following LeWitt’s own detailed instructions, invite viewers to experience his radical redefinition of authorship and collaboration.

Highlighting LeWitt’s ‘open structures’, the exhibition reveals how his skeletal cubic forms, stripped of surface and solidity, expose the underlying architecture of thought. The artist’s enduring influence lies in his conviction that ‘ideas cannot be owned; they belong to whoever understands them’.

Andrius Arutiunian (born 1991) is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer whose practice unfolds at the intersection of sound, ritual and speculative cosmology. Working across installation, performance and moving image, he approaches listening as a hybrid and political act, treating music as an architecture of distorted time. His work, shown at major international exhibitions including the Venice, Shanghai, Gwangju and Lyon Biennales, explores how belief systems, vernacular knowledge and collective rituals shape alternative models of social and temporal order.

‘Obol’, Arutiunian’s first solo exhibition in Japan, takes place from February 20 to May 31 at Le Forum. Presented by Ginza Maison Hermès and curated by Tomoya Iwata, the exhibition imagines a futuristic vision of the underworld, a speculative space where myth, sound and ceremony converge. Drawing on ancient cosmologies, esoteric texts and fragments of ritual, ‘Obol’ is conceived as a ‘club for the dead’, where time becomes viscous and hypnotic, and where the boundaries between past, present and future dissolve.

Central to the exhibition is a new body of work using bitumen, a petroleum-derived material once imbued with sacred meaning but now relegated to utilitarian use. As both material and metaphor, it anchors a meditation on Charon, the ferryman of the underworld, evoked through silver obols, serpentine forms and generative mythological imagery. Layered soundscapes weave through the space, binding playfulness and solemnity into a cold, ritualistic anthem. Through its speculative and immersive environment, ‘Obol’ invites visitors to step into a liminal journey that questions how future myths, rituals and afterlives might be imagined.

Hokkaido-born Atsushi Suwa is one of Japan’s foremost contemporary realist painters. Noted for his extraordinary technical mastery, Suwa combines rigorous research with a penetrating gaze, producing works that explore physical likeness and themes such as memory, mythology and the traces of history. His portraits, still lifes and narrative paintings have earned him wide acclaim both in Japan and abroad.

From September 11 to March 1 2026, the What Museum on Tennozu Isle presents the artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition in three years. Encompassing around 80 works, the exhibition spans early creations, intimate family portraits and newly painted still lifes, with nearly 30 of the pieces shown publicly for the first time. At the heart of the display is At the Shore (2025), a monumental painting depicting a human-like figure assembled from objects in Suwa’s studio, reflecting the artist’s pandemic-era withdrawal from portraiture and his gradual reawakening to the human form.

Curated by Takenori Miyamoto, the exhibition unfolds across five themed rooms and is accompanied by a documentary film and a short story by Akutagawa Prize winner Kaori Fujino.

The MOT will launch visitors into the mysteries of the universe with this groundbreaking exhibition running from January 31 to May 6. Marking ten years since the museum’s acclaimed ‘Mission [Space x Art]’, the new show expands the former’s scope in celebration of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (2025), bridging cosmic exploration with the ever-evolving field of quantum research.

The exhibition traces the origins of the world and the invisible forces that shape it through collaborations between artists, space scientists and quantum researchers. Alongside works inspired by astronomical investigation and spaceflight, the show will unveil the first artwork created using a Japanese quantum computer – a milestone revealing the expressive potential of a realm where conventional notions of time and space dissolve.

Visitors can expect a constellation of installations, extended-reality experiences and experimental prototypes by leading creators including Akihiro Kubota, Norimichi Hirakawa, Takuro Osaka, Yoichi Ochiai, Hideki Yoshimoto, JAXA’s research teams and many others. The exhibition also features a robust programme of talks by artists and scientists, encouraging audiences to imagine their own ‘quantum-native’ futures.

Bold, exploratory and visionary, ‘Mission∞Infinity’ invites you to witness how art continues to push beyond the boundaries of the known universe.

Johnny Depp may be best known for his eccentric on-screen roles, but long before fame, he was quietly building a collection of artworks. Now, more than 100 of his paintings and drawings – spanning from his early twenties to the present – are on view at ‘A Bunch of Stuff – Tokyo’, held at +Base 0 inside Newoman Takanawa South. 

The exhibition features five themed spaces, beginning with bold calligraphed quotes that hint at Depp’s mindset. Visitors are then led into a bohemian studio-style room filled with the actor’s personal objects and art supplies brought directly from his workspace. 

Other highlights from the exhibition include Depp’s signature ‘Death by Confetti’ series, where celebratory motifs meet skeletons to reflect the pressure of fame, as well as a video work making its Japan debut inside the immersive ‘Black Box’. Projected across a curved screen, Depp’s paintings come to life as he narrates his reflections on art, identity and the highs and lows of his long career.

21_21 Design Sight invites you to reflect on the essence of design and its human spirit through this exhibition directed by design journalist Noriko Kawakami and curator-writer Kaoru Tashiro. In an age of accelerating change and overflowing information, the exhibition looks back to six visionary 20th-century figures who shaped modern design thinking: Bruno Munari, Max Bill, Achille Castiglioni, Otl Aicher, Enzo Mari and Dieter Rams.

Spanning Italy, Germany and Switzerland, these masters transcended aesthetics to forge ethical and philosophical foundations for design, each emphasizing creativity, clarity and social purpose. Their influence endures through their iconic works as well as through their teaching and writing, which encouraged independence and critical reflection among generations of designers.

Complementing their works is a special focus on Japanese designer Shutaro Mukai (1932–2024), whose exchanges with Max Bill and Otl Aicher helped lay the groundwork for what’s called the ‘Science of Design’ in Japan. Through rare documentary footage, archival materials and seminal creations, the exhibition explores how these pioneers of modern design envisioned the discipline as a dialogue with life itself, inspiring reflection on how creativity can shape a more thoughtful and humane society.

Emerging in the wake of the Margaret Thatcher era, the Young British Artists (YBAs) and their contemporaries embraced shock, irreverence and entrepreneurial flair. While the YBA label (applied after the landmark 1988 ‘Freeze’ exhibition organised by Damien Hirst) was often contested, it came to define a generation that reimagined what art could be. Painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation all became tools for probing themes of identity, consumer culture and shifting social structures. 

The National Art Center’s ‘YBA & Beyond: British Art in the 90s from the Tate Collection’ is the first exhibition in Japan devoted exclusively to British art of the 1990s. Featuring around 100 works by some 60 artists, the show captures a turbulent and transformative period in British culture, when politics, society and art collided to spark a wave of radical experimentation.

Highlights include works by Hirst, Tracey Emin, Steve McQueen, Lubaina Himid, Wolfgang Tillmans and Julian Opie, alongside others who reshaped contemporary art on a global stage. More than a retrospective, ‘YBA & Beyond’ offers a vivid portrait of 1990s Britain, an era when art intersected with music, fashion and subculture, leaving a legacy that continues to resonate today.