5 Exhibitions to See in Japan This Week: On Kawara’s Twelve-Year Postcard Series, Minami Tada’s Seventy Years in Light

1. MAM Research 012: Diasporic Memories - Korean Artists Living Beyond Borders (Mori Art Museum)

Tracing the Korean Diaspora Through Three Artists

Now in its twelfth edition, MAM Research — the museum’s series of research-driven exhibitions — turns to the Korean diaspora, a phenomenon shaped by the social and political upheavals surrounding South Korea since the twentieth century: colonial rule, the Korean War, authoritarian rule and democratization, economic development, and globalization. The exhibition traces this diasporic experience, one that resists reduction to the frameworks of nation and ethnicity alone, through the perspectives of three artists.

The exhibition brings together three artists: Quac Insik (b. 1919 in what is now Daegu, South Korea), who moved to Japan; Song Hyun-Sook (b. 1952 in South Jeolla Province, South Korea), who settled in Germany; and Alexander Ugay (b. 1978), who has South Korean roots but was born in Kazakhstan and now divides his time between Almaty and Seoul. Working across different cultures, the three have explored migration and identity, homeland and foreign land, national memory and personal memory, each through a distinctive mode of expression. Through their work and life histories, the exhibition reframes the diasporic experience not as simple loss or rupture, but as a new vantage point where multiple cultures and memories intersect.

MAM Research 012: Diasporic Memories - Korean Artists Living Beyond Borders
Dates: Wednesday, April 29–Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Venue: Mori Art Museum (Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, 53F, 6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10 a.m.–10 p.m. (until 5 p.m. on Tuesdays, except September 22; last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: None

---

2. Daniel Buren: Situated Works 1966-2013 (SCAI PIRAMIDE)

Buren’s Practice, Meeting Its Environment

This solo exhibition is devoted to Daniel Buren, the French artist who has been active for more than six decades. He is known for work built from 8.7-centimeter-wide stripes in white and color — a form he calls his own “visual tool” (outil visuel). In the 1960s, he papered city streets with unauthorized posters, challenging the traditional institutions of art, and he has continued to treat the site itself as part of the work, as in Les Deux Plateaux (1985–86), installed in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris. His ties to Japan run deep: he has returned to the country repeatedly since Tokyo Biennale ’70: Between Man and Matter, and in 2007 he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting.

Alongside cloth and canvas works spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, the exhibition includes Variables from Painting (1966), an early piece that traces back to Buren's chance discovery, at a market, of a striped canvas awning cloth — the very fabric that gave him his signature 8.7-centimeter stripe — and Five Elements, created for a 1989 show at ICA Nagoya. Also screening is the six-and-a-half-hour film Beyond Time, as Far as the Eye Can See (2018).

Daniel Buren: Situated Works 1966-2013
Dates: Thursday, May 14–Saturday, September 19, 2026 (Part I: May 14–July 18; Part II: July 23–September 19)
Venue: SCAI PIRAMIDE (Piramide Bldg., 3F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: Noon–6 p.m.
Closed: Sundays through Wednesdays and public holidays

---

3. Shu Yonezawa Solo Exhibition: Voiceless Voice (SNOW Contemporary)

Beyond the Outline of Character

Shu Yonezawa, who works as both an artist and an animator, taking anima — the root word for “animation” — as a starting point, has made work centered on the physicality of characters in digital animation alongside the emotion and physicality of real, living creatures. In recent years, her practice has expanded beyond painting and animation into VJing, music events, and artwork for video pieces. Yonezawa was selected for an artist residency through LVMH Métiers d'Art in 2025 and held a solo exhibition in Paris.

Her solo exhibition is built around the paintings she developed in recent years. When drawing characters, Yonezawa found that the harder she tried to pin down their outlines, the more aware she became of what stayed unpainted and what spilled beyond them. Returning to the question of what forms a character (or anima), the exhibition moves through painting, drawing, video, and sculpture to trace a presence that cannot be reduced to signs alone, such as appearance and voice, actions and words.

Shu Yonezawa Solo Exhibition: Voiceless Voice
Dates: Friday, July 17–Saturday, September 5, 2026
Venue: SNOW Contemporary (404 Hayano Bldg., 2-13-12 Nishiazabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 1–7 p.m.
Closed: Sundays through Tuesdays and public holidays

---

4. On Kawara (Take Ninagawa)

Twelve Years of Postcards

One of Japan’s leading conceptual artists, On Kawara (1932–2014) is known for creating works built around time, existence, and repetition of daily life. He left for the United States in the late 1950s and, based afterward in New York, developed a practice that turned the recording of time and life itself into art — including the Today series, in which he painted the date each day. This exhibition presents I Got Up (1968–79), one of Kawara's signature series.

The series consists of postcards that Kawara sent every day for twelve years, each stamped with the time he got out of bed, to friends, family, collectors, and colleagues. Working through the existing infrastructure of the mass-produced postcard, the rubber stamp, and the postal system, Kawara folded an intensely private daily act into a broader social system, presenting the passage of time itself as the work. Among the postcards’ recipients was William Copley, an artist and gallerist closely associated with Man Ray. A concurrent exhibition of Man Ray’s work at the gallery makes it possible to trace Kawara’s own trajectory, from an early figurative style shaped by Surrealism to Conceptual art.

On Kawara
Dates: Saturday, August 1–Saturday, October 3, 2026
Venue: Take Ninagawa (Phil Park Higashi-Azabu, 2F, 2-14-8 Higashi-Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays

---

5. Minami Tada: Still, Shimmering Light (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

A Lifetime Spent Chasing Light

This is the first large-scale retrospective since the death of Minami Tada (1924–2014), one of postwar Japan's leading abstract sculptors. Born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and raised in Korea, Tada worked for nearly seventy years, from the postwar period until late in her life. She embraced industrial materials and fabrication technologies, folding the reflection, transmission, refraction, and shimmer of light into her work, and pursued forms that shifted in appearance with their surrounding environment and the movement of viewers.

The exhibition brings together roughly seventy works, from early paintings to sculpture from each period of Tada’s career and the lighting pieces she called “Lighting Sculptures.” Works integrated into architecture, along with pieces that no longer survive, are reconstructed and reassembled alongside photographs, sketches, and other archival material. Chaindelier (1963), a chandelier originally installed at the Matsuya Ginza salon, has been rebuilt at full scale, while a portion of Auspicious Clouds (1973), made for the RIHGA Royal Hotel Osaka, has been reassembled using roughly 3000 of the original crystal-glass parts.

Minami Tada: Still, Shimmering Light
Dates: Saturday, August 29–Sunday, December 6, 2026
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10 a.m.–6 p.m. (admission until 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except September 21, October 12, and November 23), and September 24, October 13, and November 24

Related Articles

• 5 Exhibitions to See in Japan This Week: Oriol Vilanova’s New Work on Reproduction and Uniqueness, George Nakashima’s “Architecture”
• 5 Exhibitions to See in Japan This Week: Edo Treasures at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and Kids Take On the Age of AI