Figures in a Landscape (2022), Arthur Timothy

What does it mean to speak of realism in an era in which “post-truth” has become so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless? A matter of days before the central exhibition at Art Week Tokyo, What is Real?, opened at the Okura Museum of Art – Japan’s oldest private museum – President Trump stayed at the adjoining hotel, often used by American dignitaries due to its proximity to the US embassy. The Okura hotel itself has been totally rebuilt on the site of the 1960s original, save for its iconic lobby, which was painstakingly recreated following outcry and a campaign led by design writers and publications. The result is a stunning, if ersatz, postmodern object of mid-century design.

The show’s curator, Adam Szymczyk, took as a jumping off point the novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s call for a “new [realism] … that would allow us to … penetrate the glass screen through which we see the world”. Featuring more than 100 works by 60 Japanese and international artists – including Bas Jan Ader, Saori Akutagawa (Madokoro), Nevin Aladağ, Ei-Q, Sachiko Kazama, Gen Otsuka, and Danh Vo – the exhibition limns the boundaries, as well as the profound historical connections, between realism in art and the dogmas of totalitarian politics.

Szymczyk gestures towards the many meanings captured within “Realism” and its progressive and reactionary forms. As he put it, “The intention of this exhibition is to show how artists respond to the reality of human experience in all its dimensions, encompassing destruction and anger, sadness and grief, but also repair and healing, joy and celebration.”

Top, the AWT Bus ferries visitors around AWT 2025. Courtesy Art Week Tokyo. Bottom, image from Tokyoites 1978-1982, Yutaka Takanashi, courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery.

Despite Tokyo’s powerful cultural position, it is notable that Asia’s major art market events, Frieze and Art Basel, take place in Seoul and Hong Kong. Art Week Tokyo (AWT), which ran last year from 5-9 November, offers an antidote to this framing. Guided by a thoughtful set of programmes, talks and events, AWT is at once commercial and conceptual, serving as an excellent introduction to the city’s burgeoning art scene. Entering its fifth year, under the inspired direction of co-founder and director Atsuko Ninagawa, the core of AWT remains the city’s galleries, connected through a network of bus shuttles.

These include Kaikai Kiki Gallery; Kotaro Nukaga; Mujin-to Production; Pace; Perrotin; SCAI The Bathhouse; ShugoArts; Taka Ishii Gallery; Take Ninagawa; Tokyo Gallery + BTAP; Tomio Koyama. Of particular note was The Clearing at space Un, curated by Ekow Eshun, a show of contemporary painters from the African diaspora exploring themes of kinship and collective memory; and the revelatory Retina series by Shinro Ohtake at Take Ninagawa, both in themselves offering different lenses on how we might consider realism, in painting and photography respectively. Ohtake’s works, in particular, fold in an aspect of chance, allowing unexpected photographic chemical reactions over time to shape the resulting works.

Alongside these gallery shows, a series of major institutional exhibitions is featured on AWT’s map of the city. Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010 at the National Art Center, Tokyo, curated by Doryun Chong of M+, Hong Kong, tells the remarkable story of postmodern Japanese art through an art-historical narrative that avoids heavy didacticism. Rather, the exhibition presents an unfolding of ideas, dialogues and conversations between forms, artists and politics – some familiar, and some less so.

Top, still from Okinawa Graveyard Club (2004), Chikako Yamashiro, courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates. Bottom, Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, one of the artists producing cocktails for the AWT Bar 2025. Photo by Seiha Yamaguchi.

A work from Shinro Ohtake’s Retina series. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

Artizon Museum, founded in 1952 by the Bridgestone Tire magnate Shōjirō Ishibashi, mounted two parallel exhibitions of contemporary art, collectively called Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection / Yamashiro Chikako / Shiga Lieko: In the midst of. On one floor, a magisterial video installation by Chikako Yamashiro wove together narratives about memory, history and colonialism in Okinawa where Japanese colonialism is mirrored by a vast US military presence, while on another Shiga Lieko’s vast sludgy photocollage – one enormous image running around the walls of the gallery – poses questions about the fishing communities in Kitakama, Iwati Prefecture, in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Across the city in Roppongi, the Mori Art Museum mounted a beautiful major retrospective of Japanese starchitect Sou Fujimoto, his architectural models forming a forest-like installation that echoes the natural forms from which his design takes its cues.

If What is Real? at the Okura Museum provided the conceptual framework for AWT, then the AWT Bar – designed by architect Ichio Matsuzawa – revealed its social heart, serving food made by chef Shinobu Namae, and cocktails mixed by artists Chim↑Pom, Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Miwa Yanagi. The bar was constructed through a series of supple acrylic sheets, bent into curving shapes which hung from the ceiling, at once visible and invisible, distorting and twisting one’s line of vision. In some ways, it felt like an architect’s riposte to Tokarczuk’s “glass screen”, a playful reminder of the malleability of the real world in which we keep rediscovering ourselves.

The history of Japanese art is, as so many of these works and exhibitions illustrate, deeply bound with its complex history of colonialism, memory and, in particular, natural disaster. Travelling through Tokyo on AWT’s bright green buses takes the visitor through competing visions of the past, present and future. Perhaps providing a centre of stillness at the midst of it all were Eiji Uematsu’s simple ceramic works, which – like Shinro Ohtake’s prints – incorporate aspects of improvisation and chance processes. Here was a centre of gravity, where craft, accident and art create a quiet new way of considering how we understand reality. .

Installation view of AWT Bar, designed by Ichio Matsuzawa. Courtesy Art Week Tokyo.