13 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

This major exhibition is both a comprehensive overview of Japan’s visual creativity over the past several decades, and an illuminating ‘portrait’ of the state of the nation over the same timeline. It’s also a powerful argument for the importance of a critical and socially engaged mindset, from the perspective of the figure whose vast collection is used to assemble this show. Ryutaro Takahashi, a veteran of the student-led protests that shook 1960s Japan, has since the mid-1990s amassed what is now one of the world’s most significant collections of Japanese contemporary art.

Across two floors of this expansive museum, works by some 115 key artists and art collectives trace the arc of the economically precarious ‘lost decades’ that, from the ’90s onwards and up to the present, have followed Japan’s booming postwar era. In work from key Japanese artists active over this period, the emotional and psychological impact of challenging times is explored overtly by some creators and more obliquely by others. Works from lesser-known, up-and-coming artists are highlighted alongside creations from the biggest names in Japanese contemporary art, including Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Shinro Ohtake and Yoshitomo Nara, to name but a few.

Among the exhibition’s five sections, perhaps the most stirring is one titled ‘Breakdown and Rebirth’, which introduces art created in the aftermath of 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake. Elsewhere, highlights include Makoto Aida’s breathtaking ‘A Picture of an Air-Raid on New York City (War Picture Returns)’ from 1996, in which the artist depicts an imaginary scenario of a Japanese air attack on NYC, upon a six-panel traditional sliding screen.

Born in Tokyo in 1936, Keiichi Tanaami is a pioneer of pop art in Japan. Though his ultra-vivid, cartoon-esque creations in assorted media have long been widely acclaimed, and exhibited at such major institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Tate Modern, right now Tanaami’s profile is higher than ever. The still-active veteran is currently represented by hip Tokyo gallery Nanzuka, he collaborates with the likes of Adidas and Yohji Yamamoto, and his work is undergoing a major positive reappraisal by the art world’s tastemakers.

Tanaami’s late-career surge in popularity is crowned by his first major career retrospective, taking place at one of his home city’s most prestigious art museums. Across the venue’s expansive galleries, consistently retina-popping work traces the artist’s progression from commercial designer – he was the first art director of Playboy magazine’s Japanese edition – to a leading figure in the country’s underground art scene.

Across paintings, collages, installations, sculptures, film, animation and more, Tanaami’s work shares a degree of spirit with Western pop artists. Simultaneously evident, though, is a visceral understanding of Japan’s unique wartime and postwar history, derived from the artist’s lived experience. The 1967 screen print ‘No More War 1’ echoes the pacifist sentiment of many young Japanese in that era, while ‘Drama of Death and Rebirth’, a 2019 canvas, is a psychedelic hellscape punctuated by fire from US fighter planes. Bringing things right up to date is Tanaami’s 2024 work for Japanese rock band Radwimps.

The work of Yoshiaki Kaihatsu goes one step beyond the social consciousness widely seen in global contemporary art. Born 1966 in Yamanashi prefecture, Kaihatsu has since the 1990s been pursuing work that involves him personally intervening in social structures. This method of his has been described as ‘one-person democracy’, hence the title of his first major show at a Tokyo art museum.

As demonstrated here by around 50 exhibits, Kaihatsu’s work both questions and reimagines the long-entrenched systems that most of us unquestioningly think of as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’. An exhibition zone named ‘Kaihatsu Town’, for example, contains an assortment of unique facilities, including a post office that delivers letters one full year after their posting, and a bank that does not handle money. 

Kaihatsu himself is present in the exhibition room each day (with occasional absences) to conduct activities which visitors may get involved in, or simply observe with intrigue and wonder. These include ‘100 Teachers’, in which 100 unique educators will give 100 equally singular classes, and events involving Kaihatsu’s collaborators in projects centred on the region hit by 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake.

Traditional Japanese art combine with vibrant illuminations to transport you to a wondrous world of fairy story and myth, in this must-see event at Meguro’s Hotel Gajoen Tokyo. Multiple rooms of this venue’s Hyakudan Kaidan (‘The Hundred Stairs’, a designated tangible cultural property) have been transformed into a unique and enchanting multi-sensory installation, with each one based upon a compelling legend. This highly photogenic event, which runs through to late September, has already wowed over 20,000 visitors.

As you ascend the lantern-lit staircase of the Hyakudan Kaidan, each of the venue’s seven floors reveals such marvels as an installation based upon the story of Toryumon, a carp who is transformed into a fearsome dragon after leaping up a waterfall. Ink paintings, ikebana flower arrangements and paper crafts combine with vivid lighting effects to place you within a world where carp swim in the air, a waterfall gushes, and the carp-turned-dragon emerges from the rough waves of the sea.

This is the first major exhibition devoted to fashion designer Takada Kenzo (1939-2020) who, besides being among the first Japanese fashion designers to find international success, was a pioneer of diversity, inclusiveness and cross-cultural mixing and matching.

A wealth of exhibits traces how, after studying fashion in Tokyo, a young Kenzo ventured alone to Paris, the world’s fashion capital, and there established his namesake label just five years later, in 1970. On the runway, Kenzo’s creations swiftly won acclaim for their unusual combinations of pattern and colour, and for the designer’s extensive use of fabrics from Japan. At a deeper level, Kenzo’s work pointed towards a future where gender, culture and national borders would all be freely transcended.

Such was Kenzo’s impact in the 1970s that the first of this show’s two main sections is devoted to his work in that decade. Exhibits here include examples of how his ’70s designs explored ‘military’ and ‘peasant’ looks, as well as embodying an approach dubbed ‘anti-couture’. The second section, meanwhile, introduces designs from a broader time frame that, while imbued with the signature Kenzo aesthetic, take inspiration from traditional costumes from across the globe.

Augmenting the many outfits are drawings and other materials that illuminate Kenzo’s design process, along with a digital presentation of his final fashion show for the Kenzo label.

Rei Naito (b. 1961) has spent her distinguished artistic career creating works that ask, ‘Is our existence on the earth a blessing in itself?’ Through examining both the scenery of the world’s overlooked corners, and subtle, minuscule phenomena, she creates what have been described as primordial scenes of life. Naito’s large-scale installations, such as ‘Being Given’ (2001) which is permanently situated on the art island of Naoshima, are especially acclaimed.

This exhibition came about through the artist’s encounter with both the architectural spaces of the Tokyo National Museum and its Jomon-period clay objects which date back as far as 10,000 years. In these artefacts, which were born out of awe and worship for nature and human existence, Naito perceived a spirit that resonates with her own work.

She has subsequently filled this museum’s natural light-flooded exhibition halls with a mix of her own original work, and museum-held Jomon objects such as a clay tablet featuring the impression of a child’s foot created sometime in 2,000-1,000 BC. An accompanying Rei Naito show, its title the same as this Tokyo National Museum exhibition, will be held at Ginza’s Maison Hermès Le Forum from September 7 2024 to January 13 2025 – the two shows will form one continuous, flowing story.

Manga lovers, as well as those simply curious about this dynamic and enduring element of contemporary Japanese culture, should check out this career-so-far retrospective from Clamp. This four-strong, all-female collective, hailing from Kyoto and Osaka, are among the country’s most critically and commercially successful mangaka. With well over 100 million manga book sales to their name, Clamp’s most famed titles include ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’ and ‘xxxHolic’.

This extensive exhibition celebrates the collective’s success by tracing their story from the 1980s, when Clamp were founded as an eleven-member group to create dojinshi (self-published manga), right through to their character design for 2024 anime ‘The Grimm Variations’, which was released worldwide on Netflix.

Though it was Beatles legend Paul McCartney’s former wife, Linda McCartney, who was the acclaimed photographer in that marriage, a recently rediscovered cache of photos shot during The Beatles’ rise to fame demonstrates that Sir Paul himself was a talented cameraman. This exhibition, comprising over 250 of these archive images, documents life from the insider perspective of one of the four members of this band that shook the world. To this day, this band is still especially loved in Japan. Following runs at London’s National Portrait Gallery and NYC’s Brooklyn Museum, the show touches down at this sky-high Roppongi venue.

Video clips and archival materials set the scene for these photos shot by McCartney over three-month spanning late 1963 and early 1964: a key period in The Beatles’ career, as they developed from a phenomenon in Britain into a global success that incited ‘Beatlemania’ wherever they travelled. The candidness of the all-monochrome images, in which fellow band members John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr loom large, evokes the feeling of a family album full of once-in-a-lifetime memories.

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is famed for a broad spectrum of activity that ranged from the deeply abstract, such as sculpting with fat and felt, to ‘aktion’ (actions) that had direct social and political significance. For this German-born artist who had experienced World War II, the act of participating in society to shape the future was a form of art that he called ‘social sculpture’.

This exhibition, at the in-house gallery of Omotesando’s fashionable Gyre complex, takes an imaginative approach to exploring Beuys’ continued relevance from a Japanese perspective. Here, objects that Beuys used in his aktion is displayed within museum-style vitrines. These glass cases are presented as ‘complete’ Beuys works, and arranged in a manner that forms engaging dialogues with five Japanese contemporary artists from the postwar period. These noteworthy individuals include painter Akira Kamo, photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, and conceptual artist Wakae Kanji.

This exhibition takes a compelling approach to displaying over 130 masterpieces drawn from the vast and wide-ranging Ishibashi Foundation Collection. Diverse works by Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Yayoi Kusama and other artists are presented here with a deep consideration of the circumstances under which they were created, and their subsequent passing down over generations. Works that now hang in world-class institutions such as the Artizon Museum, the show emphasises, may have originally been produced as decor for an individual’s home, while some have had intriguing journeys down to the present day.

Visitors are invited to imagine the places that an exhibit has occupied at various times, and this visualisation is greatly assisted by the contributions of leading designers and stylists. Lighting designer Shozo Toyohisa, for example, has devised lighting that recreates how people would have viewed 19th-century works by Rinpa school painter Suzuki Kiitsu, in the era in which they were created. Works from legendary names such as Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso are joined by pieces from some lesser-known artists who are well worth discovering.

Shibuya has a major new contemporary art venue with the opening of this museum, designed to share selections from the formidable private collection of entrepreneur Kankuro Ueshima. The six-storey facility, located within a dramatically renovated building that previously housed the prestigious British School, is set up to display Ueshima’s collection of over 650 works, from foremost Japanese and international artists, to their fullest potential.

This inaugural exhibition approaches contemporary art from a variety of perspectives, with most unfolding over an entire floor of the museum. Down in the basement, the trailblazing spirit of abstract painting is explored through work that ranges in timeline from a 1991 work by Germany’s Gerhard Richter to a piece from London-based Jadé Fadojutimi, known for her investigations of identity and self-knowledge, that was completed just this year.

Spanning the first and second floors, meanwhile, is a look at individual expression that encompasses a breathtaking range of global talent: artists include Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dan Flavin and Theaster Gates, with several names being represented by multiple artworks. The power of collaborative efforts comes to the fore through pieces created by Takashi Murakami with late Off-White designer Virgil Abloh, and by Louise Bourgeois together with Tracy Emin.

The gaze of Japanese female painters is the theme explored on the third floor, through works by artists including Ulala Imai and Makiko Kudo, while on the fourth floor, works by Tatsuo Miyajima and others take diverse approaches to the notion of things changing and things disappearing. Finally, floor five is dedicated to a selection of paintings by Yoko Matsumoto, an abstract artist who derives inspiration from Western artistic modes while expressing an Asian sensibility.

Note that tickets are not available at the door; they must be purchased in advance online.

In teamLab's new pop-up exhibition in collaboration with the Galaxy store in Harajuku, the digital art collective's enchanted forest has been transformed into an underwater fantasy. This latest installation is also an interactive one, where visitors can use smartphones to catch, study and release the colourful sea creatures they encounter in the space. There's a great variety of marine animals to see, including fish like tuna as well as aquatic creatures that are endangered or extinct. 

To catch a creature to study it, you can use the designated app on a Galaxy smartphone to scan fish swimming in the space, or throw out a 'Study Net' towards the floor if you see something interesting darting around your feet. 

Each session is an hour-long, with daily exhibitions open from 11am until 7pm.