5 Exhibitions to See in Japan This Week: Edo Treasures at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and Kids Take On the Age of AI
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. Tsubaki Noboru: FREEDOM –Living with “the Elephant in the Room” (Towada Art Center)
- 2. Sezon Museum of Modern Art Collection Exhibition Scenery Only Seen from There (Sezon Museum of Modern Art)
- 3. Yoichi Ochiai: TENSON Heard the Divine Kid's Heading Home? (Kirishima Open-Air Museum, Art Hall)
- 4. 100th Anniversary of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Edo in Focus: Japanese Treasures from the British Museum (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Exhibition Rooms)
- 5. ICC Kids Program 2026: A Promise Yet to Be Delivered — Making and Media Creations (NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Gallery A, and Hyper ICC)
1. Tsubaki Noboru: FREEDOM – Living with “the Elephant in the Room” (Towada Art Center)
The Elephant in the Room, and the Price of Freedom
This solo exhibition traces more than four decades of work by Noboru Tsubaki, who has used colossal life forms and playful sculptural language to question capitalist society, human desire, and the nature of community. He has developed his practice both in Japan and abroad since his participation in the 1993 Venice Biennale. At Towada Art Center, his giant crimson ant aTTA (2008) has stood in the museum's outdoor grounds since it opened. Centered on new work, the exhibition surveys the full arc of his career.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Elephant in the Room XL (2026), a monumental balloon sculpture in the shape of an elephant's head, made especially for the show. Its title borrows the English idiom used to describe a glaring problem that everyone notices but nobody wants to name. The venue also includes a studio space where Tsubaki himself will be in residence for about two weeks, developing the site into an installation that layers homage to Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night with memories from his student days.
Tsubaki Noboru: FREEDOM –Living with “the Elephant in the Room”
Dates: Saturday, June 6 – Sunday, November 8, 2026
Venue: Towada Art Center / 10-9 Nishi-Nibancho, Towada, Aomori Prefecture
Hours: 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (last entry 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (or the following day if Monday is a national holiday)
2. Sezon Museum of Modern Art Collection Exhibition Scenery Only Seen from There (Sezon Museum of Modern Art)
Facing the Work Itself
Sezon Museum of Modern Art has collected and presented contemporary art from Japan and abroad since it opened in 1981. Now marking its 45th anniversary, the museum reopens in a renewed space after a two-year closure, with this exhibition serving as its first collection show since then.
What the exhibition focuses on is the act of seeing itself. Its defining feature is the absence of captions or wall text in the galleries. Visitors first encounter the works on their own, then can look up information via the museum’s website or an exhibition map. The show brings together works by Anish Kapoor, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, and Tomoko Konoike, among others, structured so that each visitor's experience differs — down to the order in which they pause before each work and the reasons something catches their eye.
Sezon Museum of Modern Art Collection Exhibition: Scenery Only Seen from There
Dates: Friday, June 26 – Sunday, August 23, 2026
Venue: Sezon Museum of Modern Art / 2140 Serigasawa, Nagakura, Karuizawa, Kitasaku, Nagano
Hours: 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (last entry 1 hour before closing)
Closed: Open daily throughout the exhibition period
3. Yoichi Ochiai: TENSON Heard the Divine Kid’s Heading Home? (Kirishima Open-Air Museum, Art Hall)
Where the Gods Descended, Digital Nature Comes Full Circle
Yoichi Ochiai, the media artist and researcher, builds his first large-scale solo exhibition at a public museum around “Digital Nature,” the concept he first proposed in 2015, surveying roughly a decade of work and research. Picking up from null², his pavilion for the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo, he returns to the relationship between humans and technology, and between nature and the artificial.
The setting, Kirishima Open-Air Museum in Kagoshima, is tied to the myth of Tenson Kōrin — the descent of the heavenly grandson — and layered with traces of volcanic activity and Jōmon culture. Drawing on this sense of place, the exhibition unfolds as a series of installations that bring the digital and the natural, myth and science, into a single worldview. Tracing Ochiai’s landmark projects to date, it lets visitors experience the arc of his thinking through the space itself.
Yoichi Ochiai: TENSON Heard the Divine Kid's Heading Home?
Dates: Saturday, July 11 – Wednesday, September 23 (national holiday), 2026
Venue: Kirishima Open-Air Museum, Art Hall / 6340-220 Koba, Yusui-cho, Aira-gun, Kagoshima
Hours: 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; until 7:00 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays through August 31 (last entry 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays, except September 21 (open); if a Monday falls on a national holiday, the museum is closed the following day instead
4. 100th Anniversary of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
Edo in Focus: Japanese Treasures from the British Museum (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Exhibition Rooms)
200 Treasures of Japanese Art Return Home
Marking the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s 100th anniversary, this exhibition draws on the British Museum’s Japanese art collection — among the largest and finest held outside Japan. Formed against the backdrop of the Japonisme boom of the late 19th century, the collection has grown in depth through decades of acquisition and research. The show presents roughly 200 works, centered on Edo-period paintings and prints. Alongside recent research findings and the history of its collecting, it traces the trajectory by which Japanese art has been passed down across the sea.
A highlight is the gathering of prints and hand-painted works by the eight great ukiyo-e masters, among them Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro, Tōshūsai Sharaku, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Many works make their Japanese debut, including eight of Hokusai’s unpublished preparatory drawings for woodblock prints (hanshita-e) and a hand-painted work from Utamaro’s final years. The exhibition also reunites a set of Kanō-school sliding-door paintings, held separately by the British Museum, the Miyakoshi family in Aomori, and the Seattle Art Museum, for the first time in roughly 150 years — a rare chance to survey, under one roof, Edo-period paintings that scattered across the world.
100th Anniversary of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Edo in Focus: Japanese Treasures from the British Museum
Dates: Saturday, July 25 – Sunday, October 18, 2026
Venue: Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum / 8-36 Ueno Park, Taito-ku, Tokyo
Hours: 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; until 8:00 p.m. on Fridays (last entry 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except September 21 and October 12), and October 13
5. ICC Kids Program 2026: A Promise Yet to Be Delivered — Making and Media Creations (NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Gallery A, and Hyper ICC)
Who Gets to Create? Kids Take On the Age of AI
ICC’s annual Kids Program returns under the title A Promise Yet to Be Delivered, reconsidering today's media technologies, including generative AI, through children’s eyes. The enigmatic title points not to a finished work, but to something passed from hand to hand, changing shape with each encounter and generating new creativity and thought along the way. Embedded in it is a question: how, today, can we realize the environment media technology once promised — one in which anyone can make, think, and reclaim meaning for themselves?
On view are new installations by Scott Allen, Hiroyuki Hori, metamu, the AR Audio Guide team, and Circuit Lab. a team of UNIBA, among others. Works that shift through visitor participation, along with workshops and gallery tours, round out the program, turning the exhibition space itself into a working site of “media creations.” Though designed for children, the questions it raises about creativity and expression in the age of AI are open to adults as well, making it an appealing summer outing for families to experience media art together. Works can also be viewed in the virtual space Hyper ICC.
ICC Kids Program 2026: A Promise Yet to Be Delivered — Making and Media Creations
Dates: Saturday, July 25 – Sunday, August 30, 2026
Venue: NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Gallery A, and Hyper ICC / Tokyo Opera City Tower 4F, 3-20-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Hours: 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (last entry 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays
