The Best Booths at the Inaugural Edition of Tokyo Gendai, Buzzing with Energy and Early Sales

Jonathan Lyndon Chase at Sadie Coles HQ

In the run-up to the fair, the organizers have billed this as Japan’s first truly international art fair in at least 30 years, bringing collectors and galleries from Japan together with their counterparts from across the world, primarily from the Asia-Pacific region but also New York and Europe.

London-based dealer Sadie Coles first traveled to Japan around four years ago because of interest in the eponymous gallery’s program and has slowly been building the groundwork ahead of their participation in the fair, featuring a sampling of the gallery’s program. Coles said that the gallery had sold several works on the first day (as well as having pre-sold some works). Among the works on view here are pieces by Alex da Corte, who is currently the subject of a solo show at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and a new series of drawings in artist frames by Jonathan Lyndon Chase, that served as an introduction for the artist to the Japanese art scene.

Niyoko Ikuta at A Lighthouse Called Kanata

One of Japan’s leading glass artists, Kyoto-based Niyoko Ikuta’s sculpture, Ku-168 (2023), sold within the first hour of the fair, as indicated by the red dot (now a rarity at most art fairs) on the work’s label. This intricate sculpture is made up of several dozen hand-cut sheets of glass in an undulating, curved shape that appears differently from every angle, defying expectations of what a glass sculpture can look like. Part of the artist’s “Ku” series, which translates to “Free Essence,” the work applies a Buddhist principle that though it may be seen differently from various perspectives, there is a single truth to the work, which is its beauty, according to the gallery.

Yurie Nagashima in “Life Actually: The Work of Contemporary Japanese Women Artists”

Tokyo Gendai includes one special curated booth focusing on the work of five Japanese women artists and selected by Kasahara Michiko, the deputy director of the Artizon Museum, and Yuri Yamada, a curator at the Tokyo Photographic Museum. A standout in this section are two photographs by Yurie Nagashima, presented by Maho Kubota Gallery. In one self-portrait, Nagashima, who appears to be pregnant, stares directly at the camera as she flips off the viewer with a cigarette perched between red lips. She wears a black leather jacket and a pair of light-blue, semi-sheer underwear. Her badass pose is juxtaposed with a sock monkey toy that sits on the couch next to her. In another, even more powerful work, a woman (possibly Nagashima again though we only see the torso) lifts a pink shirt. But there is no nudity here. In front of one of her breasts, the woman holds a yellow onion that is slightly browning at the top, where a nipple would be. It is this kind of tongue-in-cheek humor that makes Nagashima an artist worth notice.

Tatsuki Masaru at Gallery Side 2

In 2012, a friend of Masaru Tatsuki encouraged the photographer to visit an archaeological dig in Niigata, on the west coast of Japan’s Honshu Island. There, pottery fragments from the Jōmon period, dating between 13,000 and 3,000 years ago, were being excavated. Tatsuki has continued to visit Niigata over the years and eventually he visited the archive room of the site’s related museum and noticed that there were several stacked boxes, which he asked to be opened. Inside, where several fragments carefully arranged on pages from various Japanese newspapers. He noticed how time was collapsing before his very eyes and began to photograph these intriguing juxtapositions for a series titled “Kakera” (Fragment). In one, titled President Kennedy Assassinated, November 23, 1962, Asahi Shimbun (photographed in Nara, November 27, 2018), a photo of a smiling Jackie Kennedy peeks out behind some of these fragments, which have never been exhibited before. 

In a recently published monograph, Tatsuki wrote that after they are stored in the box “they just sleep without being seen by anyone. Having had their ‘voice’ unheard for 3000 to 13000 years they now take yet another long sleep. We have no ability to catch their voice. Each sheet of newspaper that is used to store them has letters and characters that we understand but it is uncertain whether or not we could ever be able to read and hear what they really say.”

Keita Miyazaki at Maho Kubota Gallery

London-based artist Keita Miyazaki was living in Tokyo, where he was born and raised, when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in March 2011, which triggered a powerful tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. He still recalls how traumatic it was to witness the devastation that resulted, and, in a way, his art is a way to process those emotions. In the years since, he has gone to scraps yards to collect discarded car parts to give new life to these materials. Instead of simply welding these metal scraps together, Miyazaki adds to them hand-cut and dyed paper to add a personal touch to these very industrial materials. Behind a towering sculpture that is equal parts whimsical and avant-garde, hangs a smaller work on the wall. It resembles a traditional ikebana flower arrangement, perhaps an offering to those lost on 3.11, as that fateful day is known in Japan.

Correction, July 14, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated that Keita Miyazaki is currently based in New York; he is based in London.

Eiji Uematsu at Gallery 38

A stunning yet minimal installation at Tokyo Gendai comes courtesy Eiji Uematsu in which the booths’ walls are covered with abstract blobs of ceramics. But Uematsu does not identify as a ceramicist, instead he sees himself as playing with clay, drawing on his childhood love of making basic dorodango, a Japanese art form of molded clay spheres that literally translates to “mud dumpling.” For these works, Uematsu throws the spheres against the walls to flatten them and leaves them to dry before firing them in the kiln, using different processes to get a range of textures and colors.

Ai Kijima at The Columns Gallery

Now based in New York, Ai Kijima lived in Istanbul for four years, just prior to the pandemic. While there she would frequent the Grand Bazaar and ask the merchants if they had any fabric scraps that they might part with; several agreed to gift some to Kijima, a longtime collector of found textiles. For this large-scale work, Kijima hand sews these various pieces—in this case primarily fabrics from Uzbekistan—into an abstract collage that draws on the influence of Islamic architecture that she saw in Istanbul.

Toyin Ojih Odutola at Jack Shainman Gallery

For her first showing in Japan, New York–based artist Toyin Ojih Odutola presents a new suite of work that departs from her well-known world-building, some of which has centered two aristocratic Nigerian families, as in the Whitney Museum in 2017, and an ancient myth of a prehistoric civilization in Nigeria that was commissioned by the Barbican Centre in London in 2020. While still drawing on the formal elements employed in past exhibitions such as those, Odutola presents discrete scenes of people in slightly abstracted spaces. In one, a Black woman wearing a white fringed head covering tilts her hand against a dramatic red glove.

Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, a senior director at Jack Shainman Gallery, said that these works were made specifically with the showing at Tokyo Gendai in mind and that the fair has served as a great introduction of Odutola’s to collectors and audiences who were unfamiliar with her work. “That’s why we’re here,” she said. “We accustomed to a different type of fair where we know everyone—what’s exciting about Tokyo Gendai is that we have a chance to expand and build our collector base.”