Since the lifting of international travel restrictions from the pandemic around a year ago, the art world has seen the rise of four new fairs, one in Europe and three in Asia—the latter a testament to increasing interest in Asian markets and all the money to be spent there by both new and established collectors. The latest of these is Tokyo Gendai, which took place about an hour’s drive (45 minutes if you catch the right train) from central Tokyo, in the neighboring city of Yokohama.
In terms of quality, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect after previous experience with other fairs nearby. Perhaps it would recall last year’s inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul, featuring primarily Western galleries plus a select few blue-chip enterprises from South Korea and elsewhere in Asia. I had expected a more specific sense of place at Frieze Seoul, but it felt like many an art fair anywhere—the same kind of works from the same galleries, endlessly making the circuit. By comparison, Kiaf, Frieze Seoul’s sister fair and predecessor by 20 years, made the case that Seoul’s local art scene is thriving: an off-site section dedicated to emerging galleries tapped the pulse of art being made in the country.
Related Articles
I also wondered if Tokyo Gendai might underperform, as was the somewhat resounding takeaway from the inaugural edition of Art SG in Singapore, another fair presented by the Art Assembly, the organization behind the new Japanese fair as well as others in the Asia Pacific region (including Taipei Dangdai, India Art Fair, Sydney Contemporary, and PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai).
But the art at Tokyo Gendai was strong, and the energy thrummed in the aisles on the VIP preview day. A regional art fair serves two main purposes: to bring galleries together for a locale’s top collectors, and to showcase the best of the host city’s scene for those traveling from abroad. Tokyo Gendai accomplished both, with strong showings by international powerhouses like Sadie Coles HQ of London and Jack Shainman Gallery of New York. Both debuted new series by notable artists known for unique figurative styles—Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Toyin Ojih Odutola, respectively—who also revealed new aspects of their practices. Odutola’s striking painting So Precious (2023) shows a Black woman’s white-capped head, her chin resting on a bold red glove, a stand-alone scene marked by ambiguity that feels significantly different from her series that delve into other worlds. Chase presented everyday scenes of figures that extend out into roughly hewn artist frames painted along the edges. In one, a Black man rides a bus while the frame fills out the narrative, showing the cityscape through which he rides; in another, men go about changing in a locker room, with a frame twisting the setting by taking the form of a black gym bag.
But the real discoveries at Tokyo Gendai came from the Japanese galleries. Among the best works on view was Ku-168 (Free Essence-168), from 2023, a sculpture that seems to defy physical law by Kyoto-based artist Niyoko Ikuta, courtesy of the Tokyo gallery A Lighthouse Called Kanata. Made of several dozen sheets of cut glass, the work changes as you move around it, representing a visual metaphor for ku, the Buddhist principle of the matrix of all phenomena, or pure consciousness.
Tokyo-based Maho Kubota Gallery showed two exquisite sculptures by London-based artist Keita Miyazaki, who lived in Tokyo during the fateful 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that followed. His towering Mutual Interference (2023) mingles discarded car parts with hand-cut paper forms, and it came to mind later when I witnessed an expert creating a work of ikebana as part of a ritual in a temple in Yokohama’s Sankei-en Garden as part of the fair’s robust VIP program.
The program also included a visit to the Yu-un Guesthouse, a Tadao Ando–designed residence that showcases the collection of Takeo Obayashi, who has ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list every year since 2013. A member of the Tokyo Gendai advisory council, Obayashi was a driving force behind the fair, with a goal, he said, to see “Japanese artists spotlighted in the global market.” For visitors who made the journey, Obayashi had curated a new at-home exhibition, “The Color Behind the Colors,” looking at how artists employ different hues in their work. Among the works on view were a rare blue felt-tip-pen-on-polyester work by Robert Ryman from 1970, a nearly all-white Infinity Net painting by Yayoi Kusama, and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black-and-white Lake Superior, Cascade River (1995).
The idea for the exhibition, Obayashi told a group of about 20 visitors there to see it, came from his conversations with artists over the years about how a single shade of red can take on completely different meanings based on the artist using it or the viewer observing it. The heart of his collection, Obayashi said, isn’t the art per se but meeting artists and getting to know them; and that shows in the works he has commissioned from several artist friends—Olafur Eliasson, Lee Bul, and Lee Ufan—whose contributions to the Yu-un Guesthouse made me feel that I had left Tokyo altogether and entered a world of art unto itself.
The best place to begin a tour of Tokyo’s art scene overall might just be on the 53rd floor of the blue cylindrical tower that houses the Mori Art Museum. Over the past 20 years, the institution, under the curatorial direction of Mami Kataoka, has established itself as one of Japan’s leading museums with a range of notable exhibitions, from the recurring Roppongi Crossing triennial to solo shows for ChimPom, Chiharu Shiota, Takashi Murakami, Thomas Heatherwick, and Ai Weiwei, as well as off-kilter-sounding thematic surveys like “Catastrophe and the Power of Art” (2018) and “Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning: Our Wellbeing since the Pandemic” (2022).
Unlike other corporate museums in Japan, the Mori Art Museum—founded in 2003 by real estate tycoon Minoru Mori—started as a non-collecting Kunsthalle meant to infuse Tokyo’s art scene with a “new, magnetic energy,” according to Kataoka. But that soon changed with the institution’s enterprising exhibition and commissions program, and the museum has since amassed a notable collection of more than 450 works, with a primary focus on Japan, Southeast Asia, and the greater Asia-Pacific region. Around 90 such works made up the 150-work checklist for the museum’s 20th-anniversary exhibition, “World Classroom: Contemporary Art through School Subjects.” The exhibition focused on talking about contemporary art in a way that could be more comprehensible to the casual museum visitor, with the notion of a classroom as a place where one is exposed to various perspectives from around the world. To extend the metaphor further, the exhibition aimed to show what the Mori Art Museum has learned in the two decades since its founding.
“World Classroom” is an interesting conceit that could make for a playful and knowing exhibition, but the Mori show never quite achieved that. There were some bright spots in a section of the show titled “Language and Literature,” like Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Shovels (1965), for which the Conceptual artist juxtaposes an actual shovel alongside a photograph of it and a print-out of the dictionary definition of “shovel,” all with the aim of asking such questions as: Can a shovel be understood without its agreed-upon definition? Is the simulacrum of the shovel any less a shovel than the physical object? Another highlight was Lee Ufan’s exceptional Relatum (1968/2019), in which a large rock sits atop sheets of iron and glass. Lee is well-recognized as a philosopher whose work has been key in calling for art that not only considers our relationship to the culture around us but also decenters Western aesthetics, and Relatum, according to the wall text, “suggests that everything in the world exists not in and of itself, but rather in a relational state of harmony.”
Another section of the exhibition, titled “Social Studies,” looked at what the wall text described as “issues related to history, politics, geography, economics, and identity.” But an exhibition that takes traditional school subjects as its organizing principle risks replicating the same old canonical histories that have been taught for ages. The show’s supposed focus being on diverse viewpoints, I was baffled to see Morimura Yasumasa’s Portrait (Futago), from 1989, in which the artist presents a photographic re-creation of Manet’s Olympia (1863). In this instance, Yasumasa appears as both of the work’s key figures: Olympia as a reclining nude, and the Black servant, Laure, looking over at her while holding a bouquet of flowers. It was appalling that the Mori Art Museum would show a work featuring an artist in blackface, particularly in an exhibition meant to look at a global art history. For the museum to be unaware of the racist violence of blackface is inexcusable. The curators at the front of the “World Classroom” should have known better.
Elsewhere in Tokyo, there was much to see. A Cai Guo-Qiang survey at the National Art Center brought together an impressive grouping of the artist’s work, in which fireworks are often ignited and abstractions are gleaned from the ash. The exhibition might have benefited from more curatorial intervention and less exhaustive wall text by Cai explaining every minute detail about the works in ways that made them blur together. The salon-style hang of the exhibition only made it worse, crowding several of the best canvases documenting the fireworks to make space for a large-scale light installation, Encounter with the Unknown (2019), that featured UFOs, rockets, and more.
At the Artizon Museum, a corporate museum established in 1952 by Bridgestone Tire Co. founder Ishibashi Shojiro, an exhibition that on its surface might sound boring was in fact a nice refresher on the history of Western modernism for those who have studied it, and a primer for those coming to it for the first time. “Abstraction: The Genesis and Evolution of Abstract Painting: Cézanne, Fauvism, Cubism and on to Today” showcased the institution’s deep holdings of 20th-century art along with exceptional loans from around the world.
Among the masterpieces on view were a superb depiction of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cézanne as well as works by van Gogh, Paul Klee, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler. The inclusion of Japanese artists like Harue Koga, Kenzo Okada, and Kazuo Shiraga, whose approaches to abstraction take cues from their predecessors and make it their own, also infused the show with a sense of the new.
About a two hour’s drive from Tokyo in the coastal city of Odawara is an elegant and serene recent addition to Japan’s cultural landscape: the Enoura Observatory, designed by photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto to present an overview of Japanese architectural history as well as to showcase his collection of stones dating from the Kofun period (250–538 CE) to today. This artist museum includes a rock garden and tea house, and aims to provide respite from the hustle and bustle of contemporary city living in a former orange grove.
Sugimoto displays just seven of his own photographs—showing the horizons of seven different bodies of water, including the Sea of Japan, Lake Michigan, and the Caribbean Sea—in what he calls the 100-Meter Gallery, which stretches 100 meters and is located 100 meters above sea level. Everything else is given over to his collection of sundry pieces of history: decommissioned shrines from around Japan, a 12th-century tablet from Venice, a fossilized tree some 65 million years old that has been made into a bench, a number of several-ton rocks left over from building the foundation of nearby Odawara Castle. A full day spent exploring this unusual collection wouldn’t even scratch the surface, especially given that each architectural element was conceived to experience the light of each season’s solstice and equinox differently. As Sugimoto put it, more concisely, in writing about his Enoura Observatory: “In today’s grim world of rampant materialism and consumerism, when so much of this natural splendor has been destroyed, it is the revival of these ancient Japanese traditions that we need most.”
A version of this article appears in the 2023 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.