Art Week Tokyo 2025: A Citywide Inquiry into Reality, Ritual, and Contemporary Life

Art Week Tokyo returns from 5 to 9 November 2025 with its most expansive edition to date, transforming the Japanese capital into a citywide forum for contemporary art. Bringing together more than 50 museums, galleries, and non-profit spaces, the initiative offers an unusually layered portrait of Tokyo’s art ecosystem—one that spans historical reassessment, experimental practice, and urgent global questions.

Rather than concentrating activity in a single venue, Art Week Tokyo unfolds across the city, inviting visitors to navigate between major national museums, independent galleries, corporate art spaces, and newly activated platforms. The result is a polyphonic programme that reflects both the richness of Japan’s contemporary art scene and its deep entanglement with international discourse.

Platforms at the Core: AWT Focus, Video, Bar, and Talks

At the heart of the programme are Art Week Tokyo’s dedicated platforms, which frame the week conceptually as much as spatially.

The central exhibition, AWT Focus: What Is Real?, curated by Adam Szymczyk and hosted by the Okura Museum of Art, gathers works by 60 artists and groups from Japan and across the world. Spanning early 20th-century pioneers to contemporary practitioners, the exhibition approaches “reality” not as a fixed condition but as something fractured, mediated, and contested.

Artists such as Ei-Q, Genpei Akasegawa, Jiro Takamatsu, and Yutaka Takanashi appear alongside figures including Nevin Aladağ, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lee Kit, Naeem Mohaiemen, Vivian Suter, Danh Vo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wang Bing, and Elisabeth Wild. Photography, film, painting, performance, and conceptual practices intersect, revealing how artists across generations have responded to experiences of loss, displacement, belief, and perception. Installed within the historic architecture of the Okura Museum of Art, the exhibition creates a dialogue between global artistic inquiry and Tokyo’s own cultural memory.

Moving image takes centre stage in AWT Video: Rituals, or the Absurd Beauty of Prayers, curated by Keiko Okamura and presented at the SMBC East Tower in Marunouchi. This free screening programme brings together ten artists and groups, including Chim↑Pom by Smappa!Group, Andro Wekua, Chikako Yamashiro, Yuki Okumura, and Ryoko Aoki. Their works explore ritual as both a personal and collective strategy—one that persists in everyday gestures, political acts, and moments of absurdity, offering meaning amid uncertainty.

Social exchange becomes an artistic medium in AWT Bar, hosted at the emergence aoyama complex.

Designed by architect Ichio Matsuzawa with Kazuyo Sejima as architectural advisor, the translucent, mirage-like structure functions as a gathering space for conversation, sound, and performance.

Edible creations by three-Michelin-starred chef Shinobu Namae and artist-designed cocktails by Chim↑Pom by Smappa!Group, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and Miwa Yanagi blur distinctions between art, hospitality, and accessibility, extending the week’s curatorial concerns into everyday experience.

Critical reflection is further developed through AWT Talks, which convene leading international voices. The Directors Conversation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo brings together museum leaders from Düsseldorf, Madrid, and Beijing to discuss global platforms and local practices, moderated by Doryun Chong. The symposium What’s Going On (Ai no Yukue): How Art Makes Sense, held at Keio University, features a keynote by Naomi Beckwith alongside contributions from Adam Szymczyk and Keiko Okamura, probing how art continues to generate meaning in times of social and technological transformation.

Museums and Institutions: Reframing Histories and Practices

Across Tokyo’s major museums, Art Week Tokyo 2025 presents a series of exhibitions that reassess artistic histories while engaging with the present.

At the National Art Center, Tokyo, Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan, 1989–2010 offers a landmark survey of the period spanning the transition from the Showa to the Heisei era and the rise of globalisation. Co-curated with M+ in Hong Kong, the exhibition revisits works by more than 50 artists, situating Japanese artistic production within an international context marked by political shifts and new flows of information.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo hosts Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory, the first mid-career survey of the New York–based artist. Combining sculptural installations with improvised performance, the exhibition traces Sasamoto’s distinctive exploration of obsession, systems, and the absurdity of contemporary life.

Other institutional highlights include The Architecture of Sou Fujimoto: Primordial Future Forest at Mori Art Museum, the first major survey of the globally recognised architect’s practice, and Jam Session at the Artizon Museum, where Chikako Yamashiro and Lieko Shiga respond to the Ishibashi Foundation Collection through video, photography, and performance-inflected approaches.

Photography and film feature prominently throughout the city, from Pedro Costa: Innervisions at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s ongoing collection display, which spans early modernism to postwar experimentation. Corporate and foundation-run spaces—including Maison Hermès Le Forum, Chanel Nexus Hall, Shiseido Gallery, Espace Louis Vuitton, and Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum—further expand the programme through exhibitions addressing materials, technology, design, and modern heritage.

Galleries: A Living, Generational Ecosystem

Art Week Tokyo’s gallery programme provides a panoramic view of the city’s contemporary art scene, from historic spaces to emerging venues. Exhibitions range from solo presentations by internationally recognised figures such as Thomas Ruff, Miquel Barceló, Lee Bae, Annie Morris, Idris Khan, and Shinro Ohtake, to focused showcases of Japanese artists across generations, including Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Eiki Mori, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Makoto Saito, Tokihiro Sato, and Keiji Ito.

Younger and mid-career artists are equally foregrounded, with exhibitions exploring material experimentation, perception, ecology, and the politics of everyday life. Group exhibitions such as The Clearing at space Un, curated by Ekow Eshun, foreground diasporic perspectives and collective memory, while first-time participants and artist-run spaces underscore the vitality and diversity of Tokyo’s gallery landscape.

A City as Exhibition

Taken together, Art Week Tokyo 2025 operates less as a single event than as a dispersed inquiry—one that invites audiences to move through the city while engaging with urgent questions about reality, ritual, history, and social connection. By activating museums, galleries, public platforms, and informal gathering spaces alike, the initiative proposes an alternative model for large-scale art events: one rooted in dialogue, movement, and multiplicity.

In doing so, Art Week Tokyo not only reflects the complexity of contemporary life but also affirms Tokyo’s position as a site where global conversations and local practices continuously reshape one another.