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NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR, THIS STILL-NEW EVENT IS TAKING TIME TO DEVELOP AN IDENTITY AND ESTABLISH ITS BRAND

Published on September 12, 2025

by Edward M. Gómez

YOKOHAMA, JAPAN — Tokyo Gendai (“Tokyo Contemporary”) is a young art fair that made its debut in 2023. Despite its name, it takes place at PACIFICO Yokohama, a large facility designed for trade fairs and conventions that is located south of Tokyo in the port city of Yokohama’s waterfront district. The third edition of this art fair, whose exhibitors include Japan-based galleries and a handful of foreign art dealers, too, is taking place now, from Thursday, September 11, through Sunday, September 14.

Like most productions of this kind in the cluttered field of regional and international art fairs, Tokyo Gendai’s basic features, from a program of talks about contemporary-art topics to status-conscious provisions for VIP guests, are all neatly integrated into the infrastructure of the big affair. Meticulous Japanese attention to detail is evident in the hassle-free experience a visitor to this fair is likely to enjoy.

This year, around 65 galleries, plus a few foundations and other art-related organizations, are taking part in Tokyo Gendai. Overall, it offers something of a general view of the creative impulses animating Japan’s contemporary-art scene today but what it provides a visitor in search of a comprehensive overview of this scene is merely a snack, not a full meal. Much of what is to be found percolating in many small to medium-size galleries, assorted artists’ associations or collectives, independent art centers of the kind that are known as “alternative spaces” in the U.S.A. and Europe, and other art venues around Japan and in other parts of East Asia are notably absent.

Tokyo Gendai’s vibe is that of an art fair in search of some kind of defining substance or heft; its marketing is capably in place but, as an event, what it lacks is a strong, enticing sense of identity and purpose. Maybe those are elusive qualities that can only develop and solidify over time. Insofar as Tokyo Gendai has a local rival, that event would probably be Art Fair Tokyo, the largest annual fair of its kind in Japan and the oldest one in Asia. Alas, from year to year, it, too, suffers from the lack of a distinctive, compelling sense of identity.

This year’s Tokyo Gendai offers very few knockout discoveries; its vetting committee needs to be much more rigorous in its assessment of the quality of the merch its exhibitors intend to hawk. Booth after booth is filled with weak, retread expressions of tired ideas whose one-note samba, postmodern power to provoke was exhausted decades ago. See, for example, Ryuichi Ohira’s wall-mounted Bitcoin symbol, whose trying-too-hard effort to shock instantly falls flat; alas, this trick was played much more effectively many decades ago, when Andy Warhol first introduced his paintings of U.S. dollar bills in 1962 and his colorful paintings of the U.S. dollar sign in 1981.

Elsewhere, the Vancouver-based artist Douglas Watt serves up “Pit,” a big, sandbox-like frame filled with hundreds of cubes made with light-blue colored paper. About this work, which the artist created on site, Tokyo Gendai’s website explains that, with it, “Watt expands a scene from his local [swimming] pool’s diving practice area into a temporary monument. The work references both the foam pit, an architectural sports typology found globally used to soften falls during gymnastics practice, as well as the ubiquitous packaging used for online shopping delivery.”

Uh-huh.

Then there are the artist Aoki Chie’s curious sculptures made using urushi laquer, a material that becomes quite resistant to the effects of heat and water after it hardens. Chie’s bizarre blends of human limbs and what appear to be abstracted or suggested animal bodies — or maybe they’re just wildly manipulated human figures — are well crafted but, again, they seem to traffic in some kind of shock value for no clearly understandable purpose.

In a book about Chie’s work that is available for perusal in the booth of the Kyoto-based Sokyo Gallery, which represents her, a brief text written by the artist notes, “The figures in my work often take a somewhat sad or melancholic pose […].” She explains that, in each of her artworks, a life-size human form can be seen merging “with an abstract, rounded, jet-black mass to portray a human figure suffering from anxiety, fear, or apprehension withdrawing into [his or her] shell,” isolating itself “from the external world” and “just quietly exist[ing] in silence.”

That’s one interpretation of her sleek, shiny sculptures, to be sure. But if there is one lesson many of the offerings of this art fair propose, it’s the powerful reminder that, once artists release their creations out into the world — a vast place that includes but is not limited to the inward-looking confines of the art market — they cannot control how viewers can or will regard them.

An artist might make a painting or other artwork portraying what she says is a tree, but if a viewer interprets her production as a depiction of a duck, a roller coaster, or an ice cream cone, then it’s a depiction of a duck, a roller coaster, or an ice cream cone, no matter how many jargon-filled artist’s statements its maker might churn out and mount on a gallery’s wall to accompany it.

So it is that Chie’s peculiar concoctions may also be regarded as exuding a kind of creepy vibe. Do they really convey a sense of melancholy or, at the same time, do they revel in their gratuitous perversion of the human form for the sake of some kind of shock value? That impulse in these artworks is hard to overlook.

Among many contemporary artists (recall Maurizio Cattelan’s “Creation” (2019), a banana duct-taped to a wall), contrivance and sometimes desperate-feeling attempts to attract attention seem to be key factors motivating the making of the products they bring to market. Don’t expect their antics to change anytime soon. At a fair like this year’s Tokyo Gendai, discerning collectors will have their work cut out for them if what they’re looking for are works that are genuinely original, visionary, and marked by not just good but superb craftsmanship and a sense of technical invention.

Some of the fair’s more colorful or entertaining bonbons include the Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal’s large, abstract lenticular “paintings,” presented by Takuro Someya Contemporary Art (Tokyo). They use a printing technique that produces surfaces whose illusion of depth or motion change as observers change their viewing angles.

On display in the booth of Gallery EXIT (Hong Kong), Konstantin Bessmertny’s paintings made with acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas serve up richly detailed Asian scenes with a sense of history and storybook fantasy. Bessmertny, who was born in 1964 in the former Soviet Union, is based in Macau and Hong Kong.

Tokyo’s Miaki Gallery is showing a large “Rainbow Painting” from 1998 by the Japanese artist Ay-O (born 1931), who was active with Fluxus, the international community of avant-garde artists, in the 1960s and 1970s. With its eye-teasing composition of multicolored, wavy lines, this Ay-O canvas is in fine condition and may be seen as an emblematic example of the artist’s signature visual language and style.

Among other artists’ works, Gallery Side 2, a gallery located in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, is showing “The Night Chicago Died” (2014), an abstract painting in oil, acrylic, and spray paint on canvas by the Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis, who is based in Chiang Mai. With its multiple layers of black and red lines in overlapping, screen-like thickets, Krisanamis’s composition creates an uncanny illusion of depth.

Clearly influenced by that sector of Japanese contemporary art that has long explored its love affair with all things kawaii (cute), the artist Pex Pitakpong’s paintings in the booth of the Tokyo gallery Nanzuka depict big-eyed kids whose heads morph into the heads of animals or birds. Shoko Nakazawa’s oil-on-canvas paintings of adorable monsters offer another version of kawaii subject matter in a fine-art setting; they’re on view in the booth of the artist Takashi Murakami’s Tokyo-based Kaikai Kiki Gallery.

For all the postmodernist posing and half-baked provocation of much of the merchandise on display at this year’s Tokyo Gendai, a handful of classically modernist works serve as resonant reminders of the enduring power of certain creator-thinkers to examine the nature of art itself or to stir the soul.

To find them, look for the booths of Sundaram Tagore Gallery and John Szoke Gallery, both of which are based in New York. Among other artists’ works, Sundaram Tagore is showing “By the Dawn’s Early Light” (1984), an acrylic-on-canvas painting by Robert Natkin (1930-2010), a less well-known, Chicago-born artist who was associated with the Abstract-Expressionist movement. Natkin’s brightly colored, buoyant composition may be seen as an imaginary landscape and as an exercise in balancing color and form that is as freewheeling as it is neatly ordered. 

Among other gems, John Szoke’s booth offers a fine selection of woodcuts by Edvard Munch and drypoint and other kinds of prints by Pablo Piccaso, including the pioneering modernist’s “Degas au double regard et sept baigneuses.” Made in 1971 and published in 1978 by the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, this fine-line, drypoint image shows the French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas peering from the left side of the image at a Cubist cohort of seven standing, female nudes.

The space in which Tokyo Gendai is presented at PACIFICO Yokohama is large, and the building has plenty of room in which such a fair could grow. Assuming that this young fair can and does continue taking place in the years to come, developing a distinctive identity and a more urgent-feeling sense of purpose, it would certainly benefit from the participation of a larger number of exhibitors from a wider range of countries, including Japan. In the meantime, Tokyo Gendai provides an informative snapshot of a lively slice of Japan’s contemporary-art scene.