5 Exhibitions to See In Japan This Week: A Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective, the Book-Design Mastery of Irma Boom
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. Jonas Mekas / Gozo Yoshimasu (Take Ninagawa)
- 2. Kota Iguchi: Motion Graphics (Ginza Graphic Gallery)
- 3. Irma Boom: Book Activist (ATELIER MUJI GINZA)
- 4. Unprecedented: Women Photographers from the GDR (The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama)
- 5. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)
1. Jonas Mekas / Gozo Yoshimasu (Take Ninagawa)
Two Masters in Dialogue
A two-person exhibition pairing Jonas Mekas (1922–2019), the pioneer of postwar experimental film, with the poet and artist Gozo Yoshimasu (b. 1939), this year's recipient of the Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Longtime friends, the two influenced each other over decades, at times appearing in one another's work.
The show centers on On My Way to Fujiyama I Saw… (1996), Mekas's 16mm record of a journey through Japan with Yoshimasu, and Yoshimasu's Momentary Écriture series (1999–2000), in which the poet inscribed the scenes before him on the backs of Polaroids.
Jonas Mekas / Gozo Yoshimasu
Dates: Saturday, May 16 – Saturday, July 11
Venue: Take Ninagawa (2-14-8 Higashi-Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Hours: 11:00–19:00
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays
2. Kota Iguchi: Motion Graphics (Ginza Graphic Gallery)
Designing in Motion
A solo exhibition devoted to Kota Iguchi, the moving-image designer and creative director behind the animated sport pictograms unveiled at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Working between Tokyo and New York, he has carried his practice across moving image, advertising, and installation through the studio TYMOTE, founded in 2008, and the creative association CEKAI, founded in 2013.
The show centers on Iguchi's effort to give time and movement to graphic design, a discipline long bound to the flat surface. On the ground floor, new works made in collaboration with Rei Ishii, Ryu Mieno, and the duo Taku Sasaki and Aki Kanai revisit the field's elemental building blocks—geometry, type, and paper. Downstairs, signature projects by Iguchi and CEKAI trace the evolution of his motion graphics.
Kota Iguchi: Motion Graphics
Dates: Tuesday, May 26 – Saturday, July 4
Venue: ginza graphic gallery (DNP Ginza Building 1F & B1F, 7-7-2 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:00–19:00
Closed: Sundays and public holidays
3. Irma Boom: Book Activist (ATELIER MUJI GINZA)
Rewriting What a Book Can Be
Marking the tenth anniversary of MUJI BOOKS, this exhibition is devoted to the Dutch book designer Irma Boom, who has designed more than five hundred titles over her career, including publications for the Rijksmuseum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fondazione Prada, and Tate Modern. Boom has taught at Yale University since 1992 and is a recipient of the Gutenberg Prize and the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts. This is her first exhibition in Asia.
On view are Book Activist, the volume Boom published to coincide with the show, along with signature works held in museum collections, the models and prototype books that emerged during her process, and “IBO Paper,” an exceptionally thin stock with minimal show-through that she developed with a paper manufacturer. Boom's own words and working methods are presented alongside the works, drawing out the physicality and form of the printed book and its possibilities as a medium for carrying information. A range of book-themed events is planned over the course of the run.
Irma Boom: Book Activist
Dates: Friday, June 5 – Sunday, August 23
Venue: ATELIER MUJI GINZA, Gallery 1 & 2 (MUJI Ginza 6F, 3-3-5 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:00–21:00
Closed: In line with store holidays
4. Unprecedented: Women Photographers from the GDR (The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama)
Light from a Country That No Longer Exists
This exhibition introduces the women photographers who worked in East Germany—the German Democratic Republic—the state that vanished with German reunification in 1990. Where German photography shown in Japan has long centered on artists from the former West, this exhibition turns to photographers trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, illuminating one facet of photographic practice in the East. In doing so, it also opens a window onto the society of the period and the texture of everyday life.
The show is built around the vintage-print collection of the Berlin collector Sven Herrmann, shown in Japan for the first time. It brings together fifteen photographers—among them Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Helga Paris, and Gundula Schulze Eldowy—and extends its survey through reunification to recent moving-image work.
Unprecedented: Women Photographers from the GDR
Dates: Saturday, June 13 – Sunday, August 30
Venue: The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama (2208-1 Isshiki, Hayama-machi, Miura-gun, Kanagawa)
Hours: 9:30–17:00 (last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except July 20)
5. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)
Tracing Sugimoto in Silver
This solo exhibition is devoted to Hiroshi Sugimoto, who began in photography and has since ranged across architecture, the performing arts, and antiquities. Its title, “Extinction,” takes its cue from gelatin silver photography, the medium displaced from the mainstream by the shift to digital. It is Sugimoto's first photography-centered solo show at a Japanese museum since his 2005 exhibition at the Mori Art Museum.
The show brings together some sixty gelatin silver prints, from his earliest work of the late 1970s to the present, organized across thirteen series including Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Architecture, Conceptual Forms, and Opticks. Dioramas is presented as a group that takes in the new work Pokot, while the collection gallery unveils the previously unseen “Sugimoto Notes.” Together they survey half a century of Sugimoto's work in photography.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction
Dates: Tuesday, June 16 – Sunday, September 13
Venue: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (3-1 Kitanomaru-koen, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10:00–17:00 (until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays; last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except July 20)
