Hop on free buses to over 50 museums and galleries at Art Week Tokyo from Nov 7 to 9

TOKYO – From Nov 7 to 9, lime-green buses on seven citywide routes will ferry art lovers for free to the doorsteps of more than 50 of Tokyo’s contemporary art institutions, as part of the annual Art Week Tokyo (AWT). The event opened to the public on Nov 5.

A separate set of express buses will also take visitors from the event’s flagship selling exhibition at the Okura Museum of Art – which brings together some 100 artworks from the event’s participating galleries – to four art spaces across Tokyo, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and SMBC East Tower, where 10 video works are on show.

At the opening ceremony of the What Is Real? exhibition held at the Okura museum – Japan’s oldest private museum – on Nov 5, AWT founder Atsuko Ninagawa welcomed visitors in a brief speech in Japanese, noting the “creativity and diversity of Tokyo’s contemporary art scene” and the opportunity to buy art at the centrepiece show.

Curated by celebrated Polish art critic Adam Szymczyk, the exhibition asks what constitutes reality today and brings together works such as late Japanese conceptual artist Genpei Akasegawa’s prints of 1,000-yen notes and Chinese artist Wang Bing’s 15 Hours (2017), a 950-minute film on sweatshop workers.

Contemporary art framed Buddhist antiquities in the museum, which was packed shoulder to shoulder with international media, curators and collectors.

Mr Szymczyk said he was looking for the “smallest common denominator” of reality in his curation of a show that gestures to the loss of common ground in contemporary society.

In Roppongi’s Mori Art Museum, Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto – who designed the record-breaking Grand Ring at the

Expo 2025 in Osaka

– receives his first major institutional survey. Private galleries showing include contemporary artist Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery and blue-chip gallery Perrotin, showing work by South Korean artist Lee Bae.

AWT’s swanky social hub is its annual multidisciplinary pop-up bar at art space emergence aoyama complex that showcases new work commissioned from an emerging architect and a chef, as well as artists who create cocktails inspired by their practice.

In the 2025 edition of AWT, architect Ichio Matsuzawa has designed a shape-shifting bar made of transparent acrylic glass while Shinobu Namae, executive chef at three-Michelin-starred French restaurant L’Effervescence in Tokyo, serves up a Japanese twist on the jambon beurre (French ham sandwich) and the financier.

Three Japanese artists and collectives have dreamt up cocktails inspired by their practice.

AWT, in its fourth edition, is the only event of its kind in Tokyo to bring together public and private art institutions as an introduction to the sprawling Japanese capital’s diverse contemporary art scene. Organisers estimate that over 50,000 visitors attended the 2024 edition.

While global art sales declined by 12 per cent amid a slump in 2024, Japan has bucked the trend with overall sales increasing by 2 per cent year on year, according to The Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2025 by Arts Economics.

AWT is organised by Japan Contemporary Art Platform in collaboration with Art Basel. As new art fairs such as

Singapore’s Art SG

,

Frieze Seoul

and

Yokohama’s Tokyo Gendai

saturate Asia’s post-pandemic art market – Taipei Dangdai recently cancelled its 2026 edition – gallerists are finding new ways to engage collectors.

In 2023, Ms Ninagawa told The Straits Times that AWT aims to

move away from the high costs and overstimulation of art fairs

in favour of a model that introduces collectors to the local contemporary art scene in Tokyo.

For details on the pickup points of the free bus services at Art Week Tokyo, which run every 15 minutes from 10am to 6pm, go to

www.artweektokyo.com/en/bus-en