Art Week Tokyo (AWT) is an art festival in Japan that was founded in 2021, focusing on the nation’s rich and often overlooked post-war and contemporary art scene. It takes place every year in early November, with several thousands of art lovers flocking to the city of Tokyo to explore an eclectic mix of practices across the participating institutions. This year’s edition ran from November 2-5, 2023, and saw a sizable audience turnout.

Here are four of the most compelling exhibitions that visitors to the art fair were treated to in 2023:

Miwa Ogasawara’s Himmel at Maho Kubota Gallery channelled personal loss through visions of the sky

Miwa Ogasawara’s paintings imagine profound moments captured through mundane scenes such as quiet rooms and deep forests. Her works are predominantly tinted bluish-grey and are composed with extremely light brushstrokes. Her recent series is titled after the German word for “sky” or “heaven” and comes in the wake of a deep personal loss suffered by the artist in 2022.

That catalytic event prompted Ogasawara to spend time every day gazing up at the sky, which in turn made her think of the ubiquity of this action. Himmel, which ran at Maho Kubota (October 5-November 5, 2023), displays her efforts to capture the infinite expanse that gazes back at us.

The cathartic force of Ogasawara’s work was only magnified by its presentation within Maho Kubota’s minimalist space, a perfect place to contemplate the heavens.

Ishikawa Mao: What can I do? brings photographs centring Okinawan identity and politics to the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Ishikawa Mao hails from the Ogimi village in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, and the artist sheds light on the social and political state of Okinawa island through her photography. She is known for portraiture that prioritises the humanity of her subjects, displaying a far more intimate rapport than the usual photographer-subject dynamic.

The photographer has also produced staged works, such as The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll series, which ventures into the realm of magical realism. The photographs in this series brim with surreal darkness, hinting at brutal pasts and frightening futures for the civilian population of the Ryukyu islands, who live between the American military and the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) as US-China relations worsen.

Tokyo Opera City’s Art Gallery presents works from across Ishikawa’s career, going back to the early 1970s. The breadth of her oeuvre is as haunting as it is fascinating. This art exhibition concludes on December 24, 2023.

Kana Kawanishi Gallery presented Akira Fujimoto’s Mineralization, which turns ocean waste into contemporary art

Akira Fujimoto has been working with plastics that accumulate on beaches, since 2019. Mineralization, which was on show at Kana Kawanishi Gallery (October 21-November 18, 2023) is the latest chapter of this series and features large, colourful compositions of plastic waste that has been melted to the point of losing nearly all legibility.

The gallery’s owner, Kana Kawanishi, curated the show and she reflected on the exhibition’s success in a note to STIR, "We had a great success—large and essential pieces went to enterprises that lead the circular economy (a model of production and consumption where resources are never wasted), which we were happy about as having those pieces in their factories has a symbolic meaning. Yet, due to [the works’] size, not all sold out. We seriously feel that corporations should acquire more, as the work is beautiful and has a strong statement towards our society. Everyone uses plastics; no person on this earth is unrelated to this work.”

She also mentions that the exhibition garnered great interest from children living in the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa district of Koto City, Tokyo, where the gallery is located. The exhibition’s youngest visitors were captivated not only by the faint familiarity of Fujimoto’s materials, but the vibrance of his compositions as well. Kawanishi tells STIR, “School kids came peeking in during the installation of the show, and during the exhibition, we had around three kindergarten classes come into the gallery and have a session to meet the artist and learn the series' background, which we felt would slightly change the future.”

Gallery Koyanagi exhibited Arisa Kumagai’s powerful series …apparently God is forgiving

Arisa Kumagai’s works are as rich as they are tenebrous, and are composed of motifs that are deeply intertwined with the artist’s familial history. Her art juxtaposes opposing themes, such as life and death and love and hate, which she uses to confront her own experiences and emotions.

For …apparently God is forgiving, the artist wrote a series of poems, which Gallery Koyanagi presents as a book along with the works shown. Kumagai’s paintings are filled with Catholic imagery, while her poetry explores various issues that people are faced with, along with the  human folly of holding grudges. The exhibition concludes on January 13, 2024.

This small but potent selection of exhibitions shows some of the range of works presented at Art Week Tokyo 2023, which introduced the art world to some of the most engaging contemporary Japanese practices. International visitors to the aforementioned galleries are certain to have walked away with a newfound admiration for Japanese art, just as the connection between domestic audiences and their nation’s art will have been deepened.