Tokyo's Art Week Spreads Its Main Show Across Ten Venues

Art Week Tokyo has split its main exhibition into ten separate shows, held at ten different spaces around the Japanese capital. The week runs from Wednesday 4 November to Sunday 8 November.

The main exhibition is called AWT Focus. It launched in 2023 as the showcase of Art Week Tokyo, a annual festival of galleries and museums. This year the format changes again. Instead of one building, visitors move from space to space across the city.

There is no central venue. Free shuttle buses connect the participating spaces during the week, so visitors can travel between them without paying. The 2026 edition is the fifth full one, and the organisers say it brings together a record 56 museums and galleries. Of those, 32 are commercial galleries, the spaces where works are offered for sale.

The shows were organised in collaboration with Curated by, a gallery festival based in Vienna, Austria. Art Week Tokyo's website also says the event is held in collaboration with Art Basel, the Swiss art fair. Atsuko Ninagawa, who co-founded Art Week Tokyo, serves as its director.

The previous AWT Focus took place at the Okura Museum of Art in Tokyo. There, the curator Adam Szymczyk brought together more than 50 artists for an exhibition titled What Is Real?. This year's format puts the curators in charge of separate small projects instead.

Several of the ten shows have already been announced. At Take Ninagawa gallery, Maria Brewinska curated a presentation of Koji Kamoji, an artist born in Japan who now lives and works in Poland. At Space Un, Ekow Eshun presents work by Julianknxx, a British-Sierra Leonean artist.

Other projects take different approaches. New York-based curator Augusto Arbizo has organised a look at painting across generations at Yutaka Kikutake Gallery. Curators Greg Dvorak and Kenji Ono have put together The Constitution of Japan at Mujin-to Production, which has a second site at Aoyama | Meguro. At Waitingroom, the feminist collective Multiple Spirits, founded by Mai Endo and Mika Maruyama, is showing Patchwork of Ruffled Wings.

For visitors, the spread-out layout means the week is less about a single visit and more about planning a route. The free shuttles and the separate venue addresses are the practical details to check before setting out.