In November, the city will become a destination for local, regional, and international art during the second annual event

Tianyi Wang

Innovation, history, and collaboration at  Art Week Tokyo 2022 

Running from November 3 – 6, 2022, Art Week Tokyo’s second edition has assembled over 50 of Tokyo’s top art museums, international galleries, burgeoning art spaces, and artist-run initiatives. Art Week Tokyo (AWT) seeks to establish a network of the city’s established gallery and museum clusters while fostering the development of a convivial art ecosystem. The result showcases the Japanese capital’s dynamic contemporary art scene.AWT’s soft launch in 2021 took place amid Covid-19 travel restrictions and welcomed more than 20,000 visitors. Returning in 2022 as Japan opens its borders to individual vaccinated tourists on the visa waiver program, AWT is expanding its efforts to galvanize the Japanese arts community while reaching out to international audiences and collectors. The idea is to ‘encourage the exchange and translation of discourses between the Japanese and international art scenes,’ says Atsuko Ninagawa, AWT cofounder and director. ‘We are exploring new ways to bridge local, regional, and global art contexts.’

These intentions are reflected across AWT 2022. The logo, designed by newly appointed art director Atsuki Kikuchi, applies intersecting lines symbolizing the streets of Tokyo and underscoring the possibilities of encounter therein. The inaugural iteration of the AWT Bar, which will be an annual commission for emerging Japanese architects, has been designed as a poetic cavern by Motosuke Mandai, with a series of wafer-thin curved planes that ‘tenderly embrace people.’ The return of AWT’s special bus service operating six routes throughout the city allows visitors to take unlimited rides via the newly launched AWT PASS app. These efforts connect the decentered cultural scene of the world’s largest metropolis with the galleries and museums that form cultural constellations around the city – from Mori Art Museum and Perrotin in the Roppongi district to the new Tennozu area characterized by spacious art complexes.Public museums are celebrating this year’s AWT with landmark retrospectives.&nbsp;As part of its 15th-anniversary programming, the National Art Center is staging a retrospective to honor&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7226/Lee-Ufan" target="_blank">Lee Ufan</a>. The artist is considered a historical link between Mono-ha, a significant art movement in Postwar Japan that aimed to explore the relationship between natural and industrial objects, which he cofounded and theoreticized, and Dansaekhwa, the Korean minimalist school of painting, which he introduced to Japan in the mid-1970s. Lee was born in South Korea in 1936 and moved to Yokohama, Japan in 1956, where he studied philosophy at university. There, he absorbed a wide range of thought and literature from the East and the West, which shaped the core of his art and writing. In his sculptures, he juxtaposes natural and artificial objects such as stones and steel plates in an intense but poetic form of confrontation. His unmistakable works on canvas are defined by continuous strokes forming stripes across the surface, denoting the relationship between the body and time.

Multi-disciplinary artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8766/Shinro-Ohtake" target="_blank">Shinro Ohtake</a>, known for his eclectic oeuvre drawing on sources ranging from Kurt Schwitters to kinetic sculpture and 1970s punk culture, will stage a survey at the National Museum of Modern Art, on the occasion of the Tokyo institution’s 70th anniversary. The 500 works created over 40 years – reflecting Ohtake’s practice of working with ‘what’s already there’ – have been grouped non-chronologically according to seven key concepts encapsulating his artistic career, including memory, time, and self/other. Among the highlights is MON CHERI: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012), which was initially commissioned by ‘documenta 13’. The house-sized multimedia installation takes the form of a derelict shed jammed with a giant scrapbook and found objects collected from around the world, and phantom-like audio recordings from different cities resonate throughout the work.

In 2015, Taka Ishii, the owner of the renowned&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1448/Taka-Ishii-Gallery" target="_blank">Taka Ishii Gallery</a>, said that, in Japan, ‘it has always been the case that only Japanese artists recognized overseas will sell locally.’ With that in mind, one of AWT’s missions, according to its director, Ninagawa, (who founded&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1291/Take-Ninagawa" target="_blank">Take Ninagawa</a> Gallery&nbsp;in 2008), is to synchronize Japan with the global market and introduce a new generation of Japanese artists to national and international audiences. In Roppongi, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery and Kotaro Nukaga have embarked on a collaboration with solo shows of mid-career artists Yuko Mohri and Yuichiro Tamura respectively. In addition to these exhibitions, the galleries will cohost a talk between the two media artists, who both focus on site-specific works to trigger unconventional approaches to communicating with viewers. Meanwhile,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1468/Yumiko-Chiba-Associates" target="_blank">Yumiko Chiba Associates</a> (YCA), originally an artist management office that developed into a commercial gallery in Shinjuku with a scholarly focus on significant Postwar Japanese artists such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10833/Jiro-Takamatsu" target="_blank">Jiro Takamatsu</a>, is participating in AWT via their new Roppongi space. The gallery is staging a two-person exhibition of celebrated photographer Ryudai Takano and multimedia artist Chikako Yamashiro, both of whom visualize what is ambiguous through their work, in an attempt to normalize what is considered taboo in Japanese society.

Roppongi is also home to AWT participant&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1134/Perrotin" target="_blank">Perrotin</a>, which will present Lionel Estève’s solo show ‘Jardin de Pierre’. Perrotin opened in Roppongi in 2017, as part of a wave of international galleries which in the last decade have set up locations in the Japanese capital. Others include AWT participants&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1070/Blum-Poe" target="_blank">Blum &amp; Poe</a>, who opened in Tokyo in 2014, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1208/Fergus-McCaffrey" target="_blank">Fergus McCaffrey</a> who followed in 2018. Blum &amp; Poe has produced major monographic exhibitions of key Japanese Postwar art movements in their Tokyo and US spaces for decades, including ‘727’ in Los Angeles, in 2000 – a solo exhibition by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11158/Takashi-Murakami" target="_blank">Takashi Murakami</a>, the iconic founder of the Superflat movement that blossomed in the new millennium. ‘Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha’ also took place in Los Angeles in 2012, and ‘Vong Co RAHZI’ in Tokyo, in 2019 – the latter, a group show, featuring mid-career and emerging Japanese artists, including Chihiro Mori and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8719/Teppei-Kaneuji" target="_blank">Teppei Kaneuji</a>. With 11 of their 50 represented artists being Japanese, ‘Blum &amp; Poe has a special relationship with the Japanese art scene,’ says cofounder Tim Blum. For AWT 2022, the gallery will present new works by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30606/Kenjiro-Okazaki" target="_blank">Kenjirō Okazaki</a>, a Japanese visual artist and critic who has developed a wide range of interdisciplinary practices that transcend conventional artistic genres and classifications, spanning architecture, literary theory, painting, relief, sculpture, ceramics, robotics, and contemporary dance.

Okazaki’s interdisciplinary approach is echoed across artist-run spaces and art collectives in Japan. Video and installation artist COBRA, director of the artist-run gallery, XYZ collective, describes this as part of a strong lineage in Japan’s art history of avant-garde collectives and self-organized exhibitions. A new wave of collective endeavors has emerged in the new millennium, organized by artists to deliver urgent sociopolitical messages freely and directly to audiences, particularly after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster of the same year. For AWT, XYZ collective is hosting a solo show by Tokyo-born and Paris-raised artist Naoki Sutter-Shudo, who employs colorful, toy-like sculptures unusually conjoined to visualize the complex enmeshments of translations and mistranslations that characterize daily life. Fig., founded by multimedia artist Takayuki Kubota in 2017 to explore how an artist-run space can ‘function as a peculiar way of shaping and documenting collective memories,’ will stage a group exhibition titled ‘Drawing Fever I: Narrative, On-going’, which explores drawing as performance.

As the country that pioneered the idea of dochakuka, or what came to be known in English as ‘glocalization’ or ‘local globalization’, Japan has established a unique art ecosystem with all the ingredients to bridge local, regional, and global contexts in the 21st century. While there are attempts across Asia to lionize a single capital for art, a proliferation of local and international art events and festivals in the region has been witnessed, which according to Ninagawa, ‘leads to a more robust art market’ and ‘benefits everybody.’ Among them, AWT’s milestone collaboration between an international art fair, the Japanese government, and public and private art institutions across the city proposes an exciting alternative. Here, a decentralized yet connected glocal network amplifies and elevates all involved.Tianyi Wang is a writer and curator based in Kyoto, Japan. Art Week Tokyo is organized by Japan Contemporary Art Platform in collaboration with Art Basel. It is co-organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Art Week Tokyo Mobile Project Organizing Committee with support from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan.

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