Art Week Tokyo Draws Record 56 Venues, Boosts Global Visibility

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Art Week Tokyo (AWT) concluded its fifth edition with a record 56 participating venues, signaling the expanding reach and renewed vitality of Japan's art scene. The event's growth reflects a steady expansion in recent years, with new local galleries flourishing, established ones gaining international visibility, and international galleries opening locations in Tokyo while focusing on Japanese talent.

This year's Art Week Tokyo coincided with a period of national stability that has fostered the internationalization of Japan's art scene. A new generation of artists is achieving global recognition, and fairs like Tokyo Gendai and ACK Kyoto, which launched during Art Week Tokyo, promote cross-border exchange. With Tokyo Gendai set to relocate to the more central Ariake GYM-EX and overlap with ACK in 2027, alongside the successful launch of Tokyo Jazz Club this year, AWT aims to solidify Tokyo's position on the global art calendar.

Momentum has been building, with attendance increasing by 33 percent in 2023 and another 15 percent in 2024. International VIP numbers also climbed sharply, with VIP registrations rising approximately 36 percent over 2025, Art Week Tokyo representatives told Observer. Public attendance figures will be compiled after participating venues submit their reports following the week's close.

AWT attracted museum groups from institutions including the Guggenheim in New York, Munich's Lenbachhaus, and Mudam Luxembourg, as well as the American Friends of the Israel Museum and a collectors' circle from South Africa. Trustees and patrons from organizations such as Artists Space in New York, Dib Bangkok, M+ in Hong Kong, MoMA in New York, Phileas in Vienna, Hong Kong's Sunpride Foundation, and Tate in the U.K. were also in attendance. AWT's Visiting Professionals Program facilitated connections between Japanese artists and cultural professionals, and museum leaders and curators from institutions including the Bienal de São Paulo, Haus der Kunst in Munich, M+ in Hong Kong, Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, London's Tate Modern, and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. British patron Shane Akeroyd hosted a party for the Art Week Tokyo VIP program.

Directors' panels and conversations featured speakers such as Mary Ceruti of Walker Art Center, Andrea Lissoni of Haus der Kunst, Doryun Chong of M+, and X Zhu-Nowell of Rockbund Art Museum, who also curated the AWT Video section, supported by SMBC.

At the welcome party that opened the week, Andrew Maerkle, AWT's editorial director, told Observer that a primary focus has been consolidating talent and resources, thereby creating a connected network of participants in a system that might otherwise remain fragmented. He views Art Week Tokyo as transforming the city into a destination for unexpected international encounters.

A selection committee assembled this year's gallery roster, which included a strong mix of long-established players such as TAKA ISHII, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, TOMIO KOYAMA, and KOTARO NUKAGA, newer rising galleries like PARCEL, which joined this year, and international galleries that have recently opened in Tokyo, such as Pace, alongside the established Perrotin.

A significant change this year was the transformation of the central exhibition, AWT Focus. Traditionally led by an invited curator and presented in a single location, it became a new citywide initiative, AWT FOCUS 10×10, featuring 10 curator-led projects at 10 venues across Tokyo. This shift aligns with Art Week Tokyo's founding principles of community and shared resources while creating more opportunities for international exchange.

Among the highlights of AWT FOCUS 10×10 was Julianxxx's first solo exhibition in Japan at Space UN, curated by Ekow Eshun. Since opening two years ago, Space UN has become a pioneering platform for artists from Africa and the African diaspora in Japan. Julianxxx, a poet, filmmaker, and performer, combines moving image, voice, and music in an immersive exploration of diaspora, memory, and inherited histories. Drawing on work presented at the Toronto Biennial, the exhibition examines how cultural memory is passed down through generations and how communities process past traumas through ritual, sound, and shared expression. Moving between a desire for belonging and the search for a personal space, the work unfolds as a polyphony of voices reflecting on ancestry, kinship, and the possibility of finding light within fragmented pasts.

WAITINGROOM, an experimental gallery founded in Tokyo in 2010 and housed in a former post office, has supported emerging artists exploring personal experience and broader societal concerns, from cultural heritage and social engagement to humanity's relationship with nature. As part of AWT FOCUS 10×10, the gallery hosted“Patchwork of Ruffled Wings,” curated by the queer-feminist collective Multiple Spirits. This show extended the collective's editorial practice, rooted in its eponymous zine, into a presentation focused on textiles and prints as carriers of messages and alternative histories. Framing cultural memory as something continuously rewritten through circulation and collective exchange, it uses these narratives to address wider questions of identity and community.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, MISAKO & ROSEN, a regular presence at international art fairs, staged a new exhibition by Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti, organized by French curator Julie Boukobza, head of the residency program at LUMA Arles. The show's more abstract black-and-white monotypes extend a collaboration between artist and curator that began in 2025 with an unconventional project at Paris's Hôtel Balzac, where Verzutti's sculptures occupied a hotel bedroom in intimate dialogue with their surroundings. Conceived as portraits and afterlives of sculptures that have since entered different collections, the works capture the organic, often biomorphic forms characteristic of Verzutti's practice, recalling vegetal structures, algae, and bodily shapes while retaining playful and occasionally erotic undertones. Boukobza suggested that the drawings function almost like the storyboard of a film that has already been made, extending the life of objects through memory and representation.

Nobuko Tsuchiya's solo show“Ace of Hearts” at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, curated by Martin Clark, director of London's Camden Art Centre, presents an interconnected environment of sculptural assemblages. These intuitively combine industrial components, organic shapes, and seemingly disparate material fragments into hybrid, biomorphic entities. Rather than discrete objects, the assemblages form a network of relationships where elements hover between states of becoming, solid and soft, heavy and light, organic and inorganic, between the vibration of particles in flux and the volume of form. Tsuchiya's materially driven practice embraces uncertainty and the unexpected, allowing intuition to guide encounters between contrasting, often dissonant materials.

We previously reported:

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

Tokyo Jazz Club, an alternative art fair featuring over 60 galleries, is transforming a former capsule hotel into an immersive exhibition space during Art Week

Art Week Tokyo is set to feature a range of new collateral programs this November, including hybrid art, performance, and culinary experiences.

Source: Observer Arts

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