Seven essential exhibitions to see during Tokyo Art Week
Frieze curates the season's most compelling shows across galleries and institutions, from Mariko Mori's ethereal investigations to contemporary painting at its most urgent.
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Tokyo’s art calendar reaches its crescendo with a constellation of exhibitions that draw collectors, curators and artists from across the globe. Frieze has distilled the season’s most compelling moments into seven unmissable shows that span mediums, sensibilities and moments in contemporary practice.
Mariko Mori’s retrospective at Mori Art Museum presents the Japanese artist’s distinctive vocabulary of luminous, digitally conceived forms and avatars that investigate the liminal spaces between the spiritual and the technological. The exhibition traces the evolution of her practice across three decades, positioning her work within conversations about desire, transcendence and the body in the digital age. The museum’s architectural setting, perched high above the city, mirrors the otherworldly quality of her visions.
Elsewhere, Kishio Suga’s minimalist ‘situations’ continue to resonate through Tokyo’s gallery spaces, his precise interventions with natural materials and spatial manipulation creating meditative encounters that reward close attention and time. The sculptor’s deceptively simple arrangements of stone, wood and light refuse decoration in favour of pure phenomenological experience.
At Perrotin Tokyo, a survey of contemporary painting demonstrates the medium’s enduring vitality. Hernan Bas’s layered canvases weave together portraiture, architectural space and saturated colour, his subjects occupying complex psychological and social landscapes rendered with the intensity of a generation reckoning with identity and belonging. The exhibition runs through November, offering an extended window into work that demands contemplation.
The breadth of this year’s programming reflects Tokyo’s position as a laboratory for aesthetic thought. Whether encountering Mori’s ethereal digital constructs or the raw materiality of Suga’s interventions, visitors encounter artists working at the edges of form, meaning and perception itself.
Imagery courtesy of Frieze (@friezeofficial).
