Art Week Tokyo is back, with its largest edition to date, featuring over 50 venues set to showcase contemporary art exhibitions as well as related programming. This year new initiatives such as Tokyo Jazz Club—a “boothless” art fair co-founded by Basel Social Club founders Robbie Fitzpatrick and Yael Salomonowitz—add a fresh dimension to a week typically dominated by museum and gallery shows. Housed in a former capsule hotel, the unconventional fair pays homage to Tokyo’s jazz clubs and music halls with programming that ventures beyond visual art into performance and musical territory. An entire floor is dedicated to a vinyl-record listening space, and another to live performances by musicians. Participating galleries, both local and international, include Hong Kong’s Blindspot, Jakarta’s ROH Projects, London’s Sadie Coles, and New York– and Mexico City–based Kurimanzutto.

Art Week Tokyo co‑founder and director Atsuko Ninagawa observes that while many international artists and curators often visit Japan, a single event that brought everyone together at once was lacking. As such, Art Week Tokyo also gives local arts organisations a focus for their programming. “We are seeing museums plan ambitious exhibitions around Art Week Tokyo, such as last year’s Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010 at the National Art Center, Tokyo, which was organized in collaboration with Hong Kong’s M+, and this year’s Mariko Mori retrospective at the Mori Art Museum, co‑organized with New York’s Guggenheim Foundation,” Ninagawa says. “It [Art Week Tokyo] has supercharged international interest in producing events in Tokyo too, with the Hong Kong–based organization Serakai presenting a performance by Liang‑Jung Chen as part of this year’s collateral events program.”

Serakai Studio, which soft‑opened a space in the city earlier this spring and will stage a series of performances featuring artist Liang‑Jung Chen’s installation and durational performance ebb is to flow as wax is to wane, commissioned for the ongoing exhibition Certainly Tokyo at PATH Omotesando. Chen will navigate a maze of candles installed in the bare concrete‑shell space, which appear to be floating and collapsing.

AWT Video also continues; this year’s selection is made by X Zhu‑Nowell, the executive director and chief curator of the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Your Travel Guide To… comprises ten works by Japanese and international artists, including Fuyuhiko Takata, Cici Wu, and Shubigi Rao, which are screened in the lobby of SMBC East Tower.

“One thing that has been constant throughout is Art Week Tokyo’s commitment to experimenting with different exhibition formats in response to the city,” Ninagawa notes. With no traditional art fair to anchor it, Art Week Tokyo stands out from other art‑week experiences in that it reveals the creative nature of Tokyo and how art intersects with other creative disciplines — from music, design, architecture, and fashion to food, nightlife, and subcultures specific to the city itself.

Here’s what to see if you’re in town this week and beyond.

Mariko Mori, All That Shines at Mori Art Museum

All That Shines is Mariko Mori’s first major retrospective in Japan since 2002 and features some 40 works from across her illustrious career. Mori rose to prominence in the mid‑1990s with her Cyborg series — performance‑based photography and video works featuring sci‑fi–inspired imagery that at the time utilized advanced computer graphics. What began as commentary on contemporary Japanese society, addressing themes like Japanese animé culture, gender, and post‑humanism, has morphed into larger metaphysical concerns. Now, her practice is rooted in Zen Buddhism and takes on a more existential approach, converging with studies on light, astrophysics, and consciousness. Her mostly film‑based and sculptural works have a pearly, luminescent trademark aesthetic; the translucence brings to mind the ephemerality present in the wide‑ranging scientific and spiritual topics she explores. The exhibition includes seminal works such as Wave UFO (1999–2002), which uses viewer brainwave biofeedback to generate imagery, and Tom Na H‑iu (2006), a totemic sculpture illuminated by real‑time data from the Earth’s atmosphere.

Nam June Paik: 20th Anniversary of His Passing at Watari‑Um

Considered the pioneer of video art and among the most influential artists of the 20th century, Nam June Paik has a historical and unique connection with private contemporary art museum Watari‑Um. The artist began exhibiting at the space in the 1970s, and until his death, created several site‑specific installations at the space, which officially opened in 1990. Marking Paik’s 20th death anniversary, the exhibition looks back at the long‑standing partnership between the artist and institution, and reinforces Paik’s prescient view in today’s age of rapid technical acceleration, digital dependency, and the rise of AI. Works on view include a dense installation of plants interspersed with TV monitors, Forest of Cage / Revelation of the Forest (1993), as well as New Candle (1993), a video projection with feedback loops multiplying the light effect of a single candle.

Koji Kamoji: Everyday Life, curated by Maria Brewinska at Take Ninagawa

Featuring the work of a key figure in the Polish post‑war art scene, Everyday Life at Take Ninagawa presents the work of artist Koji Kamoji and reveals a lesser‑known connection between Japan and Poland. Based on the ethos that daily practices and routine serve as effective coping mechanisms during extreme times, the show was inspired by Kamoji’s memories of accompanying photographer Yoshino Oishi as an interpreter for her interviews with survivors of the Nazi death camps in the 1980s. New work includes A Room in Auschwitz (2026), a bare wood‑and‑paper installation evocative of a secret meeting point in the camp. It explores the possibility of small, intimate moments of connection that allow for survival in the face of violence and oppression. Other works on view include Torikaze (1975/2026), and another new work, Haiku — Well (2026), which alludes to the artist’s childhood memories of Japan. Curated by Maria Brewinska, the show highlights Kamoji’s ability to unearth stories that can get lost in broader historical narratives.