5 Exhibitions to See in Japan This Week: Oriol Vilanova’s New Work on Reproduction and Uniqueness, George Nakashima’s “Architecture”
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. Listening to Trees: The Architectural Forms of George Nakashima (GALLERY A⁴)
The Architecture Behind the Furniture
Calling himself a woodworker rather than a furniture designer, George Nakashima (1905-1990) built each piece of furniture around the innate form and grain of the timber. Born in Washington State as a second-generation Japanese American, he studied architecture at MIT and other schools before joining Antonin Raymond’s office from 1934 to 1939, where he oversaw construction of Golconde (1945), a dormitory built for an ashram in India. He was interned along with other Japanese Americans during World War II, and afterward established a furniture workshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Continuing to shape furniture by reading the character of each piece of wood, he turned in his later years to the Altars for Peace, a series of altars built as prayers for world peace.
The exhibition focuses on Nakashima’s architectural work, centered on George Nakashima Woodworkers, the live-work compound he and his family built over some thirty years. The works on view make the case that he treated architecture, furniture, and daily life as a single, integrated practice. Photographs document projects including Golconde and the Catholic Katsura Church (1965) in Kyoto, alongside video interviews with his daughter, Mira Nakashima-Yarnall, and the ceramicist Kinpei Nakamura. Thirteen furniture pieces, among them chairs and benches, are also on view, two of which visitors are invited to sit in.
Listening to Trees: The Architectural Forms of George Nakashima
Dates: Friday, July 3–Thursday, October 15, 2026
Venue: GALLERY A⁴ (1-1-1 Shinsuna, Koto-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10 a.m.–6 p.m. (until 5:00 p.m. on October 15)
Closed: Sundays and national holidays
2. Kei Takemura: All Things Move (Art Tower Mito)
What the Needle Holds in Place
Born in Tokyo in 1975, Kei Takemura has worked in a range of formats, including installations that layer embroidered cloth over photographs and drawings, sculptural pieces built from everyday objects, and performance. She treats the act of sewing as a way of holding things in a provisional state, using embroidery to preserve what no longer exists and fragments of memory within the work itself. Her practice includes the early piece A.N.’s Living Room, Premonition of an Earthquake (2005), in which she traced a friend’s daily life and stitched parts of it down as a way of preserving it against earthquakes, and a series of sculptures in which she wraps broken household objects in cloth to carry out her own version of “renovation.”
The largest solo exhibition of Takemura’s career to date, the show takes representative works from the 2000s as a starting point, presenting both her “renovated” series and a new installation built around the themes of natural disaster and renovation. Drawing on early and new works alike, it unpacks a practice that has consistently treated a world destabilized by the passage of time, the movement of people and things, natural disasters, and chance events as something to be basted—rather than permanently fixed—in place through art. A related program also invites participants to consider the meaning of “renovation” and take part in a workshop of their own; the results go on view during the run of the exhibition.
Kei Takemura: All Things Move
Dates: Saturday, July 25–Monday, October 12, 2026
Venue: Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (1-6-8 Gokencho, Mito, Ibaraki)
Hours: 10 a.m.–6 p.m. (admission until 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays, except September 21 and October 12
3. GILLOCHINDOX☆GILLOCHINDAE: AUTOFICTION (CON_)
Seven Years of JYU
GILLOCHINDOX☆GILLOCHINDAE has developed a narrative-driven practice shaped by subcultures such as manga and film, taking the city and youth as its subject. Since 2021, they have led JYU, a long-form project spanning seven chapters and seven years that combines contemporary art exhibitions with live performance, releasing one chapter a year in the story of a young man’s transformation into a black beast. The artist calls their method of building narrative from real events and personal experience interwoven with fiction “AUTOFICTION.”
The exhibition draws together works and fragments from the seven-year run of JYU into a single space, filling the gallery with paintings, sculptures, video, and drawings across different media. As each piece overlaps as an element of one larger story, the contour of JYU gradually rises into view. Moving between reality and fiction, GILLOCHINDOX☆GILLOCHINDAE has continued to build stories around the city and youth—an activity this show offers a rare chance to survey in full.
GILLOCHINDOX☆GILLOCHINDAE: AUTOFICTION
Dates: Saturday, August 1–Sunday, August 30, 2026
Venue: CON_ (Maruka Building, 4F, 2-2-14 Nihonbashi Bakurocho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 2 p.m.–7 p.m.
Closed: Monday–Wednesday
4. Oriol Vilanova: Original Copy (KOTARO NUKAGA Roppongi)
What the Postcard Repeats
Oriol Vilanova has spent years combing flea markets and antique fairs around the world to build a collection of postcards. Trained in architecture, he uses these postcards as raw material for works that explore the relationship between buildings and exhibition spaces. In 2023 he took part in “Economy and Love,” a two-person exhibition with Stefan Brüggemann at the same gallery. He is currently representing Spain at the 61st Venice Biennale, where his installation Los restos (2026) fills the Spanish Pavilion with an enormous quantity of postcards.
Marking his first solo exhibition in Japan, the show presents new postcard-based works arranged in response to the gallery's architecture. In the Spin Off series, each piece combines anywhere from two to thirty-two postcards bearing the same image, arranged with margins that follow the contours of the wall—directing attention as much to the relationship with the exhibition space as to the cards themselves. A smaller room at the back holds Old Masters (Monet) (2026). Through postcards mass-reproduced and passed from hand to hand, the exhibition probes the relationship between reproduction and uniqueness, and between artwork and space.
Oriol Vilanova: Original Copy
Dates: Saturday, August 1–Saturday, September 12, 2026
Venue: KOTARO NUKAGA Roppongi (Piramide Building, 2F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:30 a.m.–6 p.m.
Closed: Sunday, Monday, national holidays
5. Yukimasa Ida: Over the Poiesis (Gallery Chidosetsu)
Beyond Attributes: Painting the Human Itself
Yukimasa Ida was born in Tottori Prefecture in 1990 and has presented work in Japan and abroad since completing his MFA in oil painting at Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2023 he held solo exhibitions at the Yonago City Museum of Art and the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, and he now divides his time between London and Tokyo. His work has long taken human existence as its subject, most notably through the Portrait series, and in recent years he has extended his practice beyond oil painting into sculpture and ceramics.
The exhibition inaugurates Gallery Chidosetsu, a new space in Tennozu, and presents a new series of nudes Ida has recently taken up. Against a backdrop of war, the death of people close to him, and discriminatory experiences of his own abroad, Ida has focused on how nationality, ethnicity, and cultural background draw lines between people. It was from there, he says, that he returned to the nude as a way of stripping away those attributes and looking again at “the human being itself.”
Yukimasa Ida: Over the Poiesis
Dates: Tuesday, August 4–Saturday, September 26, 2026
Venue: Gallery Chidosetsu (G1 Building, 101, 2-6-4 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: Noon–5 p.m.
Closed: Sunday, Monday, national holidays
