5 Exhibitions to See In Japan This Week: Makoto Aida Paints Live, Peter Halley Unveils New Work
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. Peter Halley: Parable (Ceysson & Bénétière Tokyo)
Tracing Peter Halley’s Geometric World
Since the 1980s, American artist Peter Halley has translated the structures of contemporary society and the systems that govern human life into geometric abstraction, establishing himself internationally as one of the leading abstract painters to emerge in the wake of Postmodernism. His signature vocabulary and materials—fluorescent color and the gritty surface texture of Roll-a-Tex, a paint additive, applied to geometric motifs he calls "prisons" and "cells," each set against a rectangular base—remain instantly recognizable.
The exhibition brings together previously unseen works made between 2025 and 2026, anchored by the large-scale painting Parable, from which the show takes its title, alongside eight paintings and seven drawings. In Halley’s recent small prisons and small cells series, the cells and prisons appear to slip loose from their backgrounds, unsettling what were once fixed, rational compositions; in the medium and large scale works, multiple motifs are stacked into a single composition. Drawings that combine digital print with acrylic are also on view, tracing a formal inquiry Halley has continued to renew for more than four decades.
Peter Halley: Parable
Dates: Thursday, May 28–Saturday, August 22, 2026
Venue: Ceysson & Bénétière Tokyo (CuraGinza, 8F, 5-12-6 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, national holidays, and August 12–15
2. Two-Person Exhibition: Makoto Aida and Hiroko Okada (Museum Haus Kasuya)
Two Visions, Two Mediums
Makoto Aida and Hiroko Okada have built their bodies of work around society, history, and gender. Their two-person exhibition of new work is currently on view at Museum Haus Kasuya. For the entirety of the run, Aida spends nearly all of the museum’s opening hours painting live in front of visitors, working on a three-panel canvas titled Picture of Mixed Bathing, each panel measuring roughly 218 by 333 centimeters.
Picture of Mixed Bathing unfolds in a vast open-air bath under falling snow, bringing together figures of every age, nationality, era, and moral standing—real and invented alike—into a single scene of communal bathing. The exhibition also includes a new series of abstract paintings by Aida. Okada, meanwhile, presents By the Well, Where the Women Were, an installation centered on deceased women artists. Built from voices and light around a well where women gather to talk, the piece calls attention to women overlooked by history. Live painting and installation—two markedly different approaches—bring together each artist's recent work.
Two-Person Exhibition: Makoto Aida and Hiroko Okada
Dates: Saturday, May 30–Sunday, August 16, 2026
Venue: Museum Haus Kasuya (7-12-13 Hirasaku, Yokosuka, Kanagawa)
Hours: 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. (last entry 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays
3. Nakatani Michiko: Shadow and Bulge (Akino Fuku Museum)
Seeing Presence and Absence through Sculpture and Nihonga
Michiko Nakatani, a sculptor known for plaster reliefs, works by reversing concave and convex, casting recesses as raised forms that shouldn't logically exist—a technique that has earned her pieces the label “sculptures of absence.” In recent years, she has also produced public art for Tokyo Metro’s Toranomon Station. This exhibition pairs her work with paintings by Fuku Akino held in the collection of the Akino Fuku Museum, framed through the twin lenses of absence and presence.
On view are major works by Nakatani, including Shadow, Lulling the Fish to Sleep (2025), alongside new pieces and drawings. These are shown together with Akino’s Ruins series from the museum’s collection, drawing out a shared sensibility between sculpture and painting as distinct mediums. The pairing invites visitors to compare how each artist has folded everyday scenes and a felt sense of presence into their work, giving form to what remains unseen.
Nakatani Michiko: Shadow and Bulge
Dates: Saturday, July 4–Sunday, August 23, 2026
Venue: Akino Fuku Museum (130 Futamata, Futamata-cho, Tenryu-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka)
Hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. (last entry 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays
4. Osamu Mori: giga (PARCEL)
Questioning the Meaning of “Scale”
Osamu Mori has worked in Japan and abroad since the 2000s, probing the relationship between the body, scale, and sculpture’s place in society, primarily through wood carving. Framing his own practice as a “Gigantization Manifesto,” Mori unveiled a roughly four-meter-tall sculpture at PARCEL in 2020, and a 2023 work entered the collection of Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria. In 2024, he held a solo exhibition of large-scale work at the Rokuzan Museum in Nagano.
This exhibition extends the Gigantization Manifesto to its largest scale yet. At its center is a wood sculpture built from more than twenty trees, each over a hundred years old, on a scale approaching that of Tokyo’s roughly eleven-meter Statue of Liberty replica in Odaiba; new works in materials ranging from misshapen trees to stalactite and lead are shown alongside it. The exhibition's title, “giga,” takes as its premise an era in which the word no longer signals sheer size but has settled into everyday use as a unit of data. At a moment when our very sense of what counts as “huge” has shifted, Mori uses his largest sculpture to date to ask how scale and bodily perception relate to one another.
Osamu Mori: giga
Dates: Saturday, July 11–Sunday, August 23, 2026
Venue: PARCEL (DDD hotel 1F, 2-2-1 Nihonbashi-Bakurocho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 2–7 p.m.
Closed: Mondays, Tuesdays, national holidays, and August 13–16
5. Shota Yamauchi: The Green Before the Face (GALLERY KTO SHINJUKU)
Chroma Key as Origin: Shota Yamauchi’s Early Work
Shota Yamauchi has built a body of work around the border between the real and the virtual, and the instability of bodily perception, through video works and installations that combine live-action footage with 3D CG. While he has recently expanded into large-scale installation and performance, this exhibition centers on early work made while he was still in art school and in the years immediately after graduating.
On view are early video works built with chroma key compositing, shown alongside sculptural pieces from the same period. Yamauchi 3D-scans landscapes he films himself and imports the data into virtual space without correcting for its gaps and errors, building video environments where the real and the unreal cut across one another. The green in the title refers to the green screen used in video production, and also stands for a sense Yamauchi held onto during this period—a way of grasping the world otherwise. The exhibition traces, through this early work, the interests in the body, moving image, and sculpture that would carry into his current installation practice.
Shota Yamauchi: The Green Before the Face
Dates: Tuesday, July 21–Saturday, August 29, 2026
Venue: GALLERY KTO SHINJUKU (#103, 3-18-2 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 1–7 p.m.
Closed: Sundays and Mondays
