By Travis Jeppesen 

Since its inception in 2021, Art Week Tokyo (AWT) has offered visitors and locals alike the opportunity to experience the city’s quietly thriving art scene in a new light. Slated to take place in early November – when Tokyo’s mild autumn weather makes it an especially appealing time to visit the Japanese capital – this year’s fifth full edition will feature an impressive roster of 42 galleries and art spaces. These include several new international participants, signaling the event’s growing global reach. Additionally, 13 institutional exhibitions will showcase the work of local artists and international names.

But much of the talk surrounding this year’s edition centers on the expanded AWT Focus section, which will take a bold new curatorial approach. Since its launch in 2023 as a ‘curated sales platform with a historical scope,’ AWT Focus has been central to Art Week Tokyo. Last year’s edition, curated by Adam Szymczyk and titled, ‘What Is Real?’, sought to reframe the challenges posed by the hyper-mediated world we inhabit – a world which feels increasingly resistant to any semblance of certainty. This year, rather than a single curator and theme, Art Week Tokyo has invited ten curators to activate ten spaces with exhibitions throughout the city.  

‘AWT Focus was conceived from the start as a laboratory for curatorial experimentation and a vehicle for broadening appreciation for curatorial practice in Japan,’ says Atsuko Ninagawa, cofounder of Art Week Tokyo and director of Take Ninagawa gallery. ‘After the success of our past three editions, which each featured a single curator organizing a thematic survey at a single, central venue, we felt it was time to widen the scope to multiple perspectives and spaces.’ 

This massive expansion was inspired in part by the Vienna initiative curated by. A call for proposals was issued, with final selections made by Misako Rosen of Tokyo gallery Misako & Rosen, in conjunction with Raphael Oberhuber of Vienna’s Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, who also has a hand in the organization of curated by.

Rather than trying to subsume everything within a single, all-engulfing thesis, the exhibitions will yield a multiplicity of perspectives that arguably adhere to the ever-proliferating polarities of the art world in 2026. At XYZcollective, Olivier Mignon (who runs the Kanazawa project space Keijiban) will bring together the seemingly discordant works of Taro Masushio, whose photography is rooted in the experiences of Queer embodiment, with the sculptures of Sophie Nys, whose practice is centered on an exploration of the relations between objects and language. Take Ninagawa, meanwhile, will bring home the work of the 90-year-old Koji Kamoji, who left Japan for Poland in 1959, in an exhibition curated by Maria Brewińska, formerly of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Over at space Un – a new gallery and residency program dedicated to artists from the African diaspora – the British curator and writer Ekow Eshun will curate a solo presentation of one of the UK’s most talked-about emerging talents, Julianknxx, whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, performance, and poetry. For his show at space Un, Julianknxx will exhibit a body of work inspired by salt, while also organizing a series of off-site choral performances during Art Week Tokyo.  

What’s more, Tokyo has emerged as a destination for video enthusiasts via AWT Video, a dedicated program centered on the medium. This year’s edition will be curated by X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, with information about selected works expected to be made public in August.

Already announced are a number of the institutional exhibitions that will be included in this year’s program. Manga enthusiasts will no doubt flock en masse to the National Art Center, Tokyo, to take in its group show on shojo (girls) manga, a subversive subgenre that embraces themes of gender and sexuality. Mariko Mori will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Mori Art Museum; her cyborgian explorations from the 1990s and early 2000s will likely resonate well with current cultural anxieties surrounding AI. At the Artizon Museum, meanwhile, Hikaru Fujii will present the latest edition of the institution’s annual Jam Session series, using works from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection alongside new installations that question how truth and historical narratives are constructed.

No visit to Tokyo would be complete without experiencing the city’s famed nightlife, and Art Week Tokyo has once again incorporated an AWT Bar into its offering. This year’s watering hole will be specially designed by Office Itokae and feature artist cocktails by Natsumi Aoyagi, Mariko Mori, and Yoshihiro Suda, all of whom will have work at institutions and galleries participating in Art Week Tokyo.

Lubrication of a more intellectual sort will be provided by an AWT Talks program, the details of which are yet to be revealed, but which has in the past featured an intriguing mixture of local, regional, and international art world figures discoursing on some of the most pressing topics of the day. Finally, to shuttle you in between all these moments will be the dedicated AWT Bus, whose windows look out onto what is perhaps the greatest of all the artworks on hand: the city of Tokyo itself.   

Says Ninagawa, ‘One thing that Art Week Tokyo does, is to shine a light on the wealth of infrastructure and activity we already have in place here. But Art Week Tokyo emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the values of community building and resource sharing inform everything we do, from our programs aimed at making contemporary art more accessible to local audiences, to our collaborations with international peer organizations. I hope those values can help us to stay open to new ideas and approaches amid all the upheaval taking place around the world right now.’