An Art Lover’s Guide to Tokyo

From the influence of Japanese woodcuts on Impressionism to the proliferation of manga and anime, the global influence of Japanese art is a long and still unfolding story. Its recent chapters have been shaped by the “Cool Japan” initiative, under which the Japanese government has invested heavily in promoting national cultural interests abroad.

Post-COVID, this initiative, combined with a weak yen, has contributed to record-breaking levels of foreign tourism in Japan in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, Japan’s art market is primed for growth. Although the 2024 Art Market Report from Art Basel and UBS estimates Japan’s share of the global market at only 1% in 2023, it also suggests that interest in art from Japan is on the rise. The political situation in Hong Kong has caused increasing focus on Tokyo as an alternative art hub in the region, and tax reforms in 2022 made it easier to import artwork. Against this backdrop, new events and attractions—including Tokyo Gendai, Art Week Tokyo, the Tokyo Biennale, and the Terrada Art Complex—have sprung up, drawing attention to the capital’s art scene.

Art-seeking visitors to Tokyo will find pockets of attractions around the city that, to some extent, reflect the historical division of “uptown” and “downtown.” This distinction is derived from feudal lords having their residences located in the hilly southwest, while the working class mainly occupied the northeast around the Sumida River. To this day, an address in western Tokyo has different connotations from one to the east—with conspicuous consumption and wealth continuing to be associated more with the former. While it’s true to say all kinds of art can be found anywhere in Tokyo, clusters of galleries also take cues from the character of their neighborhoods.

With so much to discover in the world’s biggest metropolis, we’ve assembled a guide to the must-visit galleries, museums, nonprofits, and art world haunts in Tokyo.

Tokyo galleries

In Ginza

Ginza, in the center of Tokyo, has strong ties to modernism and modern art going back to Japan’s first department store opening a fine art section in 1907. Its history as a center of cosmopolitan chic and luxury brands continues to influence the art scene.

Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, which opened in 1950, switched from showing figurative oil painting in the late 19th- and early 20th-century nihonga and yōga (respectively, “Japanese-style” and “Western-style” oil painting) traditions to post-war abstraction in 1958. According to the gallery’s founder, Takahashi Yamamoto, this makes it the first commercial gallery in Japan to specialize in contemporary art. Its program covers neo-Pop, with artists such as Hiroyuki Matsuura, to neo-Mōrōism, a contemporary revival of the 20th-century mōrōtai painting style that employed soft, impressionistic brushwork.

Ginza’s historical significance can be seen in the inventory of Shihodo Gallery, which predominantly favors Japanese nihonga and yōga painters from around the 1900s—styles that have generally been more appealing to Japanese collectors than contemporary art.

Other galleries such as Nichido, which dates back to 1928, and Akio Nagasawa have attempted to update their programs by opening separate divisions focused on contemporary and emerging artists. The latter also has locations in the sleek, high-rise Toranomon Hills business district and the super-chic Minami-Aoyama, with the curation of the three galleries consciously reflecting the different character of these areas.

In Aoyama and Omotesando

Aoyama, and the adjacent Omotesando area, are Tokyo’s equivalent of Rodeo Drive. Issey Miyake, Balenciaga, Comme des Garçons, and two outstanding buildings designed by Herzog & de Meuron for Prada and Miu Miu are in Minami-Aoyama. Omotesando also hosts a string of fashion houses, several of which are housed in buildings created by Pritzker Prize–winning architects.

On either side of Omotesando—the street from which the area takes its name—are a plethora of small commercial galleries established in the 2000s. As Impressionism, figurative painting, and the historical avant-garde are to Ginza, graffiti, otaku (loosely translated as “nerd,” especially regarding the consumption of manga and anime) culture and kawaii (“cute”) culture are to these galleries.

For example, off Omotesando and down Cat Street—a mecca for younger fashionistas—Gallery Common and the newly established tHE Gallery Omotesando share an aesthetic indebted to Japanese youth subculture. Gallery Common artist Yukari Nishi, for example, paints plush toy-human hybrid characters that mix cartoonishness, surrealism, and a touch of 1950s American suburbia. The work of Nanako Yoshida, a Gen Z artist at tHE Gallery, depicts anime-style wide-eyed girls with pixie ears.

BLUM, meanwhile, deals more in Japanese post-war abstraction and Mono-ha. Fergus McCaffrey, on Aoyama-dori, also leans towards Japanese modernism and has been influential in promoting Gutai artists such as Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga outside Japan. The gallery also promotes contemporary artists from abroad at its Tokyo branch, often with an eye to exploring shared ideas and practices between Japanese and foreign artists.

In Roppongi

Roppongi, an area once infamous for its nightlife, has been reinvented as a gentrified cultural hub thanks to the development of the so-called “art triangle” of the Mori Art Museum; National Arts Center, Tokyo; and 21_21 Design Site. Commercial galleries also gravitated to the area, with the Piramide building complex housing a number of galleries.

These include Perrotin, which can draw upon a roster of internationally celebrated artists such Barry McGee and Takashi Murakami; Ota Fine Arts, which is committed to showing contemporary Asian art, as opposed to concentrating just on Japanese artists; and Kotaro Nukaga, notable for favoring art with more overtly social and theoretical concerns.

In Shinagawa

The Terrada Art Complex (TAC), two multi-level warehouses in south Shinagawa, has branches of established Tokyo galleries such as Scai The Bathhouse, ShugoArts, Tomio Koyama, and Taka Ishii. Alongside them are younger galleries whose artists are more representative of millennial and Gen Z culture.

Gallery UG’s roster, for example, includes Kunihiko Nohara, whose brightly painted wooden figures are reminiscent of Studio Ghibli characters, and Takaoki Tajima, whose cat characters are a mix of Miffy and Yoshitomo Nara’s petulant toddlers. Gallery UG has two venues in TAC, with a third gallery opening in the Kansai region in 2024.

Contemporary Tokyo leans into kyara art (art that portrays anime or manga-like figures), appealing to a local crowd. “This kind of work has been more popular to Asian viewers than visitors from Western countries,” said gallery director Rika Utsugi.

The waterfront Tennozu Isle district hosts the annual Tennoz Art Week, aiming to promote contemporary art and cultural tourism with workshops, a street market, and performances.

In Taito Ward

Before anime and manga, subculture in Japan could be said to be the “floating world” of the Yoshiwara, the red-light district from which the artsyukiyo-e style of woodblock printing sprung. One location of the Yoshiwara was in today’s downtown Asakusa area. In contrast to the predominantly white-cube model of the galleries mentioned so far, Asakusa Gallery is an unadorned 1965 townhouse, which was renovated by the owner and curator Koichiro Osaka. Combining an intimate space and curation that grapples with social and economic topics, the exhibitions at Asakusa Gallery have an energetic edge, in keeping with the area’s history of cultural provocation.

For those who believe that there should be no distinction between art and popular culture, Mograg Gallery describes itself as a “low-brow” artist community. The work is not dissimilar to what can be found in Omotesando or the Terrada Art Complex, but priced more affordably.

In Sumida Ward

On the other side of the Sumida River from Asakusa, the neighborhoods of Mukojima and Kyojima have several eclectic artist-run and small commercial spaces. Kōbō Gallery sells ceramic objects with intricately painted Japanese iconography, and is the workshop of Chinese artist Zhang Yue. The nearby Reminders Photography Stronghold specializes in photo books and runs bookbinding workshops, artist residencies, and portfolio reviews.

Further south, Mujin-to Production has a roster of artists for whom site-specificity, intervention, and artistic independence are key issues. Among these are Sachiko Kazama, whose black-and-white woodcut prints have parodied militaristic propaganda; the provocative art collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group; and Meiro Koizumi, whose work has dramatically confronted Japan’s military history. Describing Mujin-to’s curatorial outlook, director Eri Ishijima said, “We try as much as possible not to select artists with similar expressions and thoughts. It is important to be different.”

Museums and nonprofits

The two biggest venues for contemporary art in Tokyo are the Mori Art Museum, which was founded by the late property developer Minoru Mori with the goal of making Tokyo an international art hub, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), which is funded by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Both run exhibitions of big-name international artists, but also have programs for supporting local emerging talent.

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Ebisu, another municipal institution, has a public access photo archive and regularly shows contemporary photography and video art alongside exhibitions of vintage and modern prints. The annual Yebisu International Festival of Art And Alternative Visions, which focuses on photography and video, has evolved around the museum.

In Ginza, the nonprofit Shiseido Gallery claims to be Japan’s oldest art gallery. Originally opened in 1919, the venue today showcases excellent picks of emerging and mid-career artists, successfully updating the gallery’s founding mission, for contemporary Japan, of exploring beauty in art and life.

With its high ceilings and glass-block walls, Maison Hermès’s Le Forum gallery, at the top of the Renzo Piano–designed Hermès store in Ginza, is an aesthetic experience in itself. In the context of Hermès’s tradition of luxury craftsmanship, the exhibition program favors work that manifests careful attention to materials.

On Omotesando, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has the Éspace Louis Vuitton, which sits atop a Jun Aoki–designed building that was made to resemble stacked Louis Vuitton travel trunks. Exhibitions here draw on the foundation’s considerable collection, with past shows including Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George, and Christian Boltanski. Down the road, the visually discombobulating multi-use Gyre building houses the nonprofit Gyre Gallery. Under the slogan “Shop and Think,” the complex consciously mixes art, craft, design, and commercialism. Gyre Gallery hosts intellectually stimulating shows of consistently high quality, often curated by the Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts.

Between Omotesando and Shibuya, the Ueshima Museum, which opened in 2022, aims specifically at contemporaneity. Its substantial private collection, which includes work by Kohei Nawa, Chiharu Shiota, Banksy, and Damien Hirst, is a mixture of internationally renowned stars and younger Japanese artists.

Nearby is the historically significant Spiral building, designed by Fumihiko Maki to evoke different Japanese writing systems: formal and rectilinear kanji on the outside, cursive hiragana on the inside. The space hosts exhibitions of art, craft, and fashion.

Off Aoyama-dori is the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, a key Tokyo venue. It champions emerging Japanese artists in addition to showing works from its collection of historically significant figures, including Andy Warhol, Man Ray, and Donald Judd.

Art world haunts