9 best art exhibitions in Tokyo right now

French-born artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) has long loomed large over Roppongi Hills: her outdoor sculpture of a gigantic spider, named ‘Maman’, is a local landmark. The sprawling development’s Mori Art Museum, then, is a fitting venue for this major retrospective of one of the most important artists of the past century. As explored by Bourgeois’ first large-scale Japanese solo exhibition in over 25 years, fear was an ongoing motivation over her seven-decade career.

This fear, however, was not the arachnophobia that one might suppose, given the formidable ‘Maman’. Rather, Bourgeois’ work was driven in part by fear of abandonment; something rooted in her complex and sometimes traumatic childhood. Through her famed oversized sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings and other mediums, she confronted painful personal memories while simultaneously channelling them into work that expresses universal emotions and psychological states.

Across three exhibition ‘chapters’ that each explore a different aspect of family relationships, highlights include the ‘Femme Maison’ series of paintings from the 1940s. These works, which decades later were championed by the feminist movement, each depict a female figure whose top half is obscured by a house which protects yet imprisons her.

Bourgeois’ extensive use of the spider motif, meanwhile, is examined in depth. As hinted at by the landmark ‘Maman’ (the French equivalent of ‘mummy’), for Bourgeois the spider was symbolic of the mother figure who heals wounds just as a spider repairs the threads of its web. The artist's use of this powerful symbol is traced from a small 1947 drawing through to the giant Roppongi arachnid and its 'sister' sculptures located in several cities worldwide.

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.

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.

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.

The life of painter Tanaka Isson (1908-1977), best known for expressing the natural beauty of the Unesco World Heritage-designated island Amami Oshima, took a truly dramatic arc. While still a child, his outstanding talent for nanga – a Japanese painting style inspired by the aesthetics of the Chinese literati – led to him being hailed as a young prodigy destined for success.

After he dropped out of Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts) for still-unknown reasons, subsequent decades saw Isson work as a farmer, while continuing to paint despite lack of recognition. At the age of 50, in 1958, he relocated alone to remote Amami Oshima, close to Okinawa in Japan’s southwest, whose tropical flora and fauna would inspire him anew.

While working as a fabric dyer to support his artistic practice, Isson developed a way of conveying his idyllic new surroundings that was painterly and simultaneously marked by a level of vivid detail that could today be described as ‘high definition’. It was only following Isson’s death at the age of 69, while still residing on Amami Oshima, that his work began to receive its long-overdue acclaim.

Isson’s posthumous reputation has continued to grow, culminating in this major retrospective comprising over 250 works. Paintings, sketches, documents and other artefacts create a complete picture of the artist’s life and work, with some recently discovered pieces revealing hitherto unknown aspects of his creative practice.

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.