Art Week Tokyo: Five Exhibitions From Paik to a 2025 Graduate

Art Week Tokyo spans five exhibitions running from now until late December, anchored by a retrospective marking 20 years since the death of Nam June Paik, the "father of video art", at Watari-um, the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, until 23 November.

The youngest artist on the list is also one of the most striking. Utanhole, born in 2001 and a 2025 graduate of the Tokyo University of the Arts, presents her solo gallery debut at KaiKai Kiki Gallery. Her pastel-hued paintings blend cinematic suspense with manga-style precision, depicting calm young figures against collapsing cities, weapon-laden spaces and deadly explosions. She calls her signature style "soft violence", a concept of intense emotional and visual contrasts. The work draws on chūnibyō, the Japanese term for intense, dark adolescent fantasies, and the show features new large-scale paintings and drawings exploring the coping strategies of contemporary youth culture.

What grows in the cracks of the city?

At Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, the group exhibition "Seeds and Roots: How to Cultivate a City" runs until 20 December. It investigates how residents can re-engage with nature in an increasingly artificial environment, focusing on new ecosystems thriving in the literal cracks of asphalt: non-native species, self-sustaining plants and organisms that coexist with concrete and plastic. As human activities disrupt ecosystems, the boundary between natural and artificial blurs, and the exhibition promotes coexistence with these changes rather than resistance. Tomoko Azumi, Yasutake Iwana, Akari Kaneko, Akiko Ikegami, Yoko Daihara, Yoji Ohno and Akane Saijo use everyday activities—living, wearing, eating and excreting—to reimagine the environment.

How does chaos become sculpture?

Miho Dohi returns to Hagiwara Projects for her fourth solo show, running until 12 December. The Kanagawa-based sculptor is internationally known for small, intricately layered, tactile abstract assemblages she calls buttai, a Japanese term combining the characters for thing and body. She combines common natural materials with industrial parts, relying on intuition and physical activity rather than pre-planned forms, repeatedly flipping her pieces to break away from a single viewpoint. The process ends when an original, unexpected structure naturally emerges from the chaos. Her new works use materials that seem heavy yet hang lightly on walls or from the ceiling, as if floating in space.

What lies between objects?

Alicja Kwade's first solo show at Pace Tokyo, "La Pêche miraculeuse", runs until 25 December. The Polish-born, Berlin-based conceptual artist takes a methodical, almost scientific approach to abstract existential questions, using natural materials and everyday objects to explore space, time, gravity and social constructs. The exhibition examines empty space—the space within and between objects—through sculptures and works on paper featuring peaches, clocks, tunnels, stones and clock hands, addressing what constitutes the world and the viewer's reflections on existence.

Why does Paik still matter?

The Watari-um retrospective draws on the museum's extensive collection to examine how Paik's ideas—combining technology, Eastern philosophy and nature—remain relevant in a world of smartphones and AI. Paik trained as a classical pianist and musicologist before joining the 1960s Fluxus avant-garde and reshaping Modern art with television sets, broadcasting networks and video recording devices as materials for sculpture, performance and installation. The show presents him not solely as a tech-focused artist but as both performer and deep thinker. Its Japanese title, Jugemu, comes from a traditional rakugo story about endless life, symbolising the idea that Paik's art and impact will endure forever—an argument visitors can test against their own smartphone screens before 23 November.