5 Exhibitions to See In Japan This Week: A Shigeo Toya Memorial, and Ryoji Ikeda’s Universe of Data
From major museum shows to gallery highlights, ARTnews JAPAN editors select the must-see exhibitions now on view across Japan. This article is also available in Japanese.
- 1. Henry Roy “DEVOTION” (space Un)
- 2. Ryoji Ikeda “sleeping beauty” (TARO NASU)
- 3. Kurashiki Aya: A woman is born, and a woman dies–mother’s blood, wine, chocolate, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol (Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art)
- 4. Baltic Island (Spiral)
- 5. In Memory of Shigeo Toya: The Sculptor (ShugoArts)
1. Henry Roy “DEVOTION” (space Un)
Henri Roy’s Eco-Poetic Photography, in Dialogue with Yoshino
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the photographer and writer Henri Roy emigrated to France with his family in childhood and has been based in Paris ever since, developing a singular practice within the context of the Afro-diaspora. His work draws on the poetic sensibility of the French Nouvelle Vague, Haitian mystical thought, and the magical realism of Latin American literature—and though photographic in form, it leaves the strong, lingering resonance of a dream or a fragment of memory.
The exhibition brings together new work made during an artist residency in Yoshino, Nara Prefecture, alongside earlier images shot in Africa and Haiti. Roy’s ongoing practice, which he calls "eco-poetic," approaches the world as a layered space—one populated not only by visible beings but by otherworldly ones. Through symbolic images of birds, landscapes, and animals, the exhibition presents photography not as mere record but as a medium that binds living environments to the spiritual. The result is a meditative space, one that emerged from Roy’s encounter with the nature of Yoshino.
Henry Roy “DEVOTION”
Dates: Saturday, April 25 – Sunday, June 21
Venue: space Un (KLO Minami-Aoyama Building, 2-4-9 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 12:00–19:00
Closed: Mondays and Tuesdays
2. Ryoji Ikeda “sleeping beauty” (TARO NASU)
Tracing the Sale of Perception
Based in France and Japan, Ryoji Ikeda has spent his career translating sound, data, and mathematical concepts into perceptual experience through electronic music and installation. In the early 1990s he composed music for the performance group Dumb Type, and in recent years he has drawn international attention through projects such as his solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.
The first solo gallery show in four years presents data.graph [n°1], a new moving-image work developing the “data.gram” series he began in 2022. It also debuts new pieces from his “sleeping beauty” series, which uses numerical sequences as a point of departure to draw viewers toward a sense of cosmic scale. Across the exhibition, Ikeda foregrounds the finitude of human perception within vast fields of information and computational space, while inviting reflection on the sublime and the invisible—territories he has explored throughout his recent work.
Ryoji Ikeda “Sleeping Beauty”
Dates: Saturday, May 9 – Saturday, June 6
Venue: TARO NASU (Piramide Building 4F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:00–19:00
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays
3. Kurashiki Aya: A woman is born, and a woman dies–mother’s blood, wine, chocolate, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol (Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art)
Between Body, Memory, and Art History
Tokyo-based Aya Kurashiki, who studied oil painting at Kyoto University of the Arts and in the graduate program at Tokyo University of the Arts, has drawn attention through honors including selection for the Shell Art Award 2020. She is known for transferring onto canvas collages that layer religious paintings, web images, and her own photographs—works that probe questions of faith, care, and community.
At the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kurashiki presents new work that takes the museum’s own holdings as its motif, among them Uemura Shōen’s Flower of Life. By layering her own bodily experience and personal memory onto the history of Kyoto art, she opens up a new relationship between the individual and history. What the transfer process captures is not only imagery but the time and the gazes accumulated within it.
Kurashiki Aya: A woman is born, and a woman dies–mother’s blood, wine, chocolate, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol
Dates: Saturday, May 30 – Sunday, August 30
Venue: Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, The Triangle (124 Okazaki Enshoji-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto)
Hours: 10:00–18:00
Closed: Mondays (except public holidays)
4. Baltic Island (Spiral)
The Baltics Now, in Illustration and Animation
Baltic Island introduces contemporary illustration and animation from the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Structured as a journey through a series of “islands” shaped by technique, theme, and emotion, it brings into view the rich visual culture flourishing across the Baltic region today. Ranging from children’s book illustration to conceptual practice, comics, and experimental animation, the show moves across diverse forms to map a landscape of images where hand-drawn, digital, and hybrid techniques converge.
Under Soviet-era censorship, the region cultivated a culture of expression that placed meaning between the lines. Today’s younger artists inherit that layered sensibility while forging visual languages of their own, interweaving candor, humor, and irony. An accompanying program of animation screenings spans the poetic and introspective to the bold and experimental. Through imaginary islands that appear on no map, visitors can take the measure of where the Baltic imagination stands today.
Baltic Island
Dates: Monday, June 1 – Sunday, June 14
Venue: Spiral (5-6-23 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:00–19:00
Closed: Open daily
5. In Memory of Shigeo Toya: The Sculptor (ShugoArts)
Shigeo Toya, Trunk, 1984, wood, iron frame, acrylic, 120x32x30cm. (Right)
Photo: Shigeo Muto/Copyright the artist/Courtesy of ShugoArts
Rebuilding Sculpture: Shigeo Toya’s Lifelong Pursuit
This memorial exhibition honors the sculptor Shigeo Toya, who passed away in April 2026. Working amid currents such as post-Minimalism and Mono-ha, Toya pursued the reconstruction of a sculpture that those movements had dismantled, and went on to become a defining figure in Japanese contemporary sculpture. Growing up in Nagano, ringed by the Northern Alps, shaped sculptural theories of his own, among them what he called “mountain-valley structure” and “diagonal structure.” His honors include the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize (2004), the Medal with Purple Ribbon (2009), and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette (2025). He served as professor emeritus of sculpture at Musashino Art University.
The exhibition presents Woods—I, an early work made with a chainsaw in 1984, alongside Semi-Sculpture, the series he turned to in his final years. Also screened is footage of an interview recorded in his studio in 2016. Ranging from cave painting to contemporary sculpture, the show offers a chance to retrace the inquiry and practice through which Toya continued to interrogate being and form.
In Memory of Shigeo Toya: The Sculptor
Dates: Saturday, June 6 – Saturday, June 27
Venue: ShugoArts (complex665 2F, 6-5-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:00–18:00
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays
