In early November, as a chill began creeping through the air, several thousands of art lovers flocked to the city of Tokyo, eager for a taste of Japanese contemporary art. They came from all over the world and from every corner of Japan, to attend Art Week Tokyo (AWT), which is the city’s largest initiative to promote post-war and contemporary Japanese art, occurring every year in November. AWT 2023 ran from November 2-5, with VIP events for global curators, collectors and members of the press beginning amidst costumed crowds on Halloween. While the general audience attending the art week were certainly treated to a phenomenal selection of Japan’s rich contemporary art scene, it was during these VIP events when Tokyo’s Halloween festivities were at their height, that was the greatest sight to behold: A city filled with galleries offering an eclectic mix of practices, while bands of children took to the streets, embodying their favourite fictional characters. Tokyo’s creativity was at its peak during this time and made for an unforgettable experience.

Returning to the art festival, AWT is organised by Japan Contemporary Art Platform in collaboration with Art Basel, and receives support from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs as well. It brings together around 50 art institutions within the city of Tokyo, to display post-war and contemporary Japanese practices in tandem, giving them greater visibility on the world stage. Additionally, AWT also organises talks and gatherings aimed at creating greater engagement between global curators and collectors and the Japanese arts ecosystem.

The festival’s co-founders are Atsuko Ninagawa and Kazunari Shirai. Ninagawa is also its director, and is the owner and director of Take Ninagawa Gallery, which is one of the participating institutions. Additionally, she sits on the selection committee of Art Basel Hong Kong, making her a powerhouse within the art world, whose overarching curatorial direction has been critical in shaping the festival’s raison d'etre. Shirai is the CEO of the asset management company Sequedge Group; the owner of the Japanese publisher Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha; the founder of Zenkoukai, which is a social welfare corporation; and an author who focuses on economics. He is also an avid art collector, with over 500 works by names such as William Kentridge, Wolfgang Tillmans and Yayoi Kusama among others.

The 2023 edition of AWT is considered to be the second outing by the team behind it, as its soft launch in November 2021 occurred under pandemic conditions. Notably, the 2023 edition brought a critical point of evolution to the DNA of the art event, through the launch of AWT Focus, a curated sales platform. AWT Focus joins AWT Video, which presents single-channel video art pieces by Japanese and international artists; AWT Talks, which hosts curatorial roundtables; and the gathering space AWT Bar, as the festival’s four community platforms meant to deepen an appreciation for Japanese post-war and contemporary art. The inaugural edition of AWT Focus’s theme was Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present, and it was organised by the guest curator Kenjiro Hosaka, the director of the Shiga Museum of Art. Hosaka joins Ninagawa in a conversation with STIR, to shed light on the motivations behind the festival and its new sales platform.

Art Week Tokyo was born out of frustration at the lack of knowledge regarding Japanese practices, within the Japanese and international arts communities. This is a matter made amply clear by both Hosaka and Ninagawa. Ninagawa is motivated, above all else, by a desire to present post-war and contemporary Japanese practices as original and pioneering, both at home and to the art world at large. Discussing Japanese attitudes towards the country’s own art practices, she tells STIR, “Japan has more than a century of modern and contemporary art history, but that history does not get the recognition it deserves in Japan so far. This is because people here tend to assume that earlier generations of Japanese artists were simply copying avant-garde styles imported from ‘the West’, when in fact they were often at the forefront of innovations.” Ninagawa cites the Japanese artist Koshiro Onchi, who created his own form of abstraction in the early 20^th century, around the same time as Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. She also mentions that the Gutai Art Association pioneered Happenings in the 1950s, an art format that they say is mistakenly credited to the American artist Allan Kaprow.

The Director continues, “Similarly, this history does not get its deserved recognition outside of Japan due to linguistic and contextual barriers that require complex and time-consuming processes of translation to overcome. As a result, instead of building up a continuous awareness of Japanese art in an international context, it almost feels as if we have to reintroduce Japanese art to international audiences every few years, because the global discourse moves so quickly in the contemporary media environment.” Addressing the gap in interest and knowledge about Japanese contemporary art is a key motivator behind Art Week Tokyo.

Ninagawa’s efforts have been bolstered by the launch of AWT Focus, which prompts visitors and potential buyers to reconsider existing narratives of Japanese art from the postwar era to the present. Hosaka adds to Ninagawa’s statement regarding the conspicuous lack of knowledge about Japanese contemporary art, telling STIR that art from Japan is often understood in relation to Euro-American art histories, and that this tendency has caused him frustration in the past. It is worth noting then, that AWT Focus’s launch entailed an art exhibition that took place at the Okura Museum of Art, which possesses relatively narrower interiors than many of the other venues under the AWT umbrella. While the venue may seem slightly cramped and counterintuitive to some, the museum is a traditional Japanese building, opened in 1917, that still stands in a city that was largely rebuilt in a modernist style after the firebombings of World War II. It becomes apparent then, that the museum carries the cultural heritage that Hosaka would likely have critics place the works on display within.

As Hosaka began looking outside Euro-American frameworks of artistic discourse, he eventually came upon the art critic Noi Sawaragi. He tells STIR, "Sawaragi proposed the idea of Japan as a ‘bad place’ where the interdisciplinarity of Euro-American modern art and contemporary art doesn’t function, because the disciplines themselves were never established in Japan, and everything is necessarily all mixed up from the start.” When he approached post-war Japanese art through Sawaragi’s lens he found that, rather than presenting a nebulous mass of genres and disciplines, there was in fact a conscious pursuit of dynamism within the works he looked at. This “dynamic tension” goes further than matters of era or movement, which is how Western art is often approached, and in the Japanese context blurs even the line between art and craft. This point underlines the point of view of AWT Focus, perfectly encapsulated in pieces such as Tatsuaki Kuroda’s Dressing table, red lacquered (1980), which consists of a striking red dressing table and pair of chairs. To approach the art installation as a work of art necessitates that one first understand Kuroda Tatsuaki, who was a craftsman committed to experimentation as a “lacquer artist”. His many creative contributions, such as founding the experimental crafts workshop Kamigamo Mingei Kyodan, earned him the position of a “Living National Treasure” in 1970.

AWT’s spotlight on post-war and contemporary Japanese art has not stopped Ninagawa from expanding to select Euro-American practices as well. During the fair, her gallery Take Ninagawa presented the British artist Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings, along with a selection of his film works. The gallerist and festival director discusses the relationship between Jarman’s Black Paintings and works by the artists on Take Ninagawa’s roster, saying: “Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings resonate with the work of a number of artists in my gallery, especially Shinro Ohtake, who spent a formative period in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was during his time in London that the contemporary artist began making his Scrapbooks, in which he pastes all kinds of ephemera and found objects, ranging from images cut out from magazines and old photographs to product packaging and old albums.” As Jarman similarly worked with detritus that washed up on the shore outside his cottage in Dungeness, England, she believes that both Jarman and Ohtake, in a sense, charted the flows of global material culture through a localised perspective.

To come back to the wider context of Art Week Tokyo 2023, Ninagawa tells STIR that AWT and AWT Focus have received excellent feedback from both the Japanese and international art communities, and that she and the rest of the team behind the art fair are eager to continue paving the way for contemporary Japanese artists, curators and galleries to participate in the global arena. Whatever the future may hold for the fair, the 2023 edition was certainly an enlightening experience for art lovers, and will have surely left its attending audience of over 32,000 visitors with fond memories of Tokyo.