Kankuro Ueshima Opens Private Museum In Tokyo Housing 850 Contemporary Works

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Japanese entrepreneur Kankuro Ueshima has launched the UESHIMA MUSEUM in Tokyo, a private, six-floor institution housing his collection of 850 contemporary artworks. Located in a former British School building within the Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen, the museum features works by prominent contemporary artists, many acquired directly from exhibitions, fairs, and biennials globally.

Ueshima, who began collecting seriously around 2022, built his extensive collection in less than five years. He consulted Kyoko Hattori, then Phillips's representative in Japan and now vice president at Pace Gallery, for guidance on international galleries. A pivotal moment for Ueshima occurred in 2016 when he saw Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild 941-1 in New York.“Kensuke Onishi of Peace Winds Japan, whom I had met through disaster-relief work, had told me about Richter's engagement with society, and seeing the painting in person deepened that interest,” Ueshima recalled in an interview with Observer. His first acquisition was Bernard Frize's Bitje from Perrotin in Tokyo.

Without a family background in collecting, Ueshima developed his approach by identifying works he found appealing, often studying Instagram accounts of major galleries as Hattori suggested. He also received mentorship from Takeo Obayashi, a leading Japanese collector. Ueshima explained his guiding principle:“As the collection has grown, my guiding idea has remained contemporaneity: how artists experience and express the time we share.” He values a work's details, materials, and its distinctive voice, along with the insights gained from learning its background. Ueshima initially collected for his personal spaces but decided to open the museum to share works that would otherwise remain in storage.“Sharing work with others became part of what collecting meant to me, and that led me to open the museum,” he said.

Working with curator Yuko Hasegawa, Ueshima discovered“the pleasure of exhibiting as well as collecting.” Hasegawa has shaped the museum's exhibition program since its opening, using the placement and relationships between works to create narratives. The current exhibition,“ The Image Burns, Distorts, and Sublimates into Light,” which was on view in September during Tokyo Gendai, brings a substantial portion of the collection into view. Hasegawa designed the visitor's ascent from the basement to the top floor as a narrative of transformation, beginning with emotionally charged large-scale paintings and progressing through Pop-inflected urban energy and shifting representations of the human figure, culminating in abstract light.

The exhibition begins in the basement with“Dissolution and Landscape,” exploring individual mortality and environmental concerns. Highlights include Raqib Shaw's The Pragmatic Pessimist (2024), a jacquard-woven tapestry acquired from White Cube in 2026, depicting an apocalyptic winter. This work is juxtaposed with Minoru Nomata's Continuum-21 (2024), which imagines futuristic architectural worlds, and Kei Imazu's The Sea is Barely Wrinkled (2025), a monumental canvas reflecting on civilization's fragility.

The first floor,“City and Trace,” features works by Daniel Arsham and JR, which engage with consumer culture and urban imagery. Arsham's eroded sculptures transform everyday objects into archaeological relics, while JR's Louvre interventions explore public space and architectural memory. Nanae Mitobe's satirical work on Donald Trump's political rhetoric and pieces from Mika Rottenberg's Lampshare series also critically engage with contemporary contradictions.

“Repetition and Image,” on the next floor, examines the nature of images in the digital age. This section includes more abstract and serial works such as Gerhard Richter's STRIP (2025), which shows imagery dissolving into mechanical repetition. Ai Weiwei's Table with two legs (2005) challenges familiar object forms. Also featured is teamLab's Matter is Void – Fire (2022), a digital work linked to the collective's early NFT experiments, questioning exclusivity in digital art. An entire room is dedicated to Ryoji Ikeda's nine-screen installation data [n°1b-9b] (2011/2022), acquired from TARO NASU in 2022, which translates vast data into rapidly changing visual configurations.

We previously reported:

Five exhibitions in Tokyo feature emerging Japanese artists Utanhole and Miho Dohi, a group show on urban nature, and a Nam June Paik retrospective.

Architect Kae Ito designed the modular“secret garden” themed AWT Bar for Art Week Tokyo, featuring collapsible structures and surprise-focused cuisine.

Art Week Tokyo is reconfiguring its AWT Focus platform for 2026, launching ten exhibitions across city-wide galleries and art spaces, moving from a single

Source: Observer Arts

MENAFN03112026005694012507ID1111910509