Tokyo Gendai Best Booths 2025

The first thing that caught my eye was a pitch-black branch exhibited by Ingleby Gallery of Edinburgh. At first, I wondered why there was a branch at all—but up close, its surface revealed a rough, black coating. It had been covered in the ash of over 10,000 different tree species.

Scottish artist Katie Paterson attempts to condense the vastness of Earth’s natural history into a single object. Her work draws on grand scientific themes—geology, time, the universe—translated through poetic sensibility and meticulous research. In this piece, one branch becomes enough to transport the viewer from the artificial context of Pacifico Yokohama to the deep time of the natural world. —Asuka Kawanabe

CON_, a young Tokyo gallery that turned heads at Frieze Seoul last week, is showing a solo presentation by Korean painter Minhee Kim. On view are three large-scale works from her Jakarta residency, along with a new series produced at Art Omi in New York.

Since her debut, Kim has depicted the female figure through the lens of ’90s cyberpunk and techno-orientalism. Her early works featured character-like symbols, but more recent pieces explore how the beauty and violence embedded in images of women shaped by contemporary media.

The image of women with a cyborg-like artificial beauty is born from desires created in modern cultures such as K-POP and social media, and the way the female form changes in a viscous way gives a sense of the distortion of such desires. And as the artist herself has said that she also has a desire for such bodies within herself, what she portrays is likely both a fetishized image of modern women and a self-portrait —Shunta Ishigami

At the Vancouver-based Unit17 booth, a work by Douglas Watt hangs on a wall covered in masking tape. Born in 1990, Watt works on the unceded Indigenous territories of the Musukliam, Sukwamish, and Tsleil-Wautu peoples in British Columbia and regularly contributes to curatorial projects across Canada.

His miniature pieces are made from familiar everyday materials—cardboard, staples, sponges, popsicle sticks—and drawn from places he regularly visits. They quietly re-describe a world constantly expanding with information.

Across the booth, an installation made for the “Sato ‘Meadow’” section shows something new: a large-scale piece depicting the diving practice area of a local swimming pool. It’s an unusual move for an artist typically working at miniature or life-size scale.—Kiyoshi Sato

Born in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, in 1972, Aya Fujioka is showing three works from her River Flows series, which won the 43rd Kimura Ihei Photography Award. Using the seven rivers of Hiroshima as a motif, the series metaphorically traces the history, memory, and lingering presence of the atomic bomb.

The series’ seemingly cheerful or serene scenes of daily life mask sharp, forceful questions. One image shows high school girls playing with an atomic bomb dome in the background; another captures elementary school students in red caps gazing in the same direction (what are they looking at?), as birds fly overhead. With an approach quite different from that of Ken Domon, Fujioka exposes the Hiroshima that quietly underlies everyday life. Encountering these works again this year—marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing—reinforces their significance.

In the photobook accompanying the series, Fujioka writes: “The river flows like blood. Blood flows like a river.” —Maya Nago

At the booth of Busan-based Johyun Gallery, a bronze sculpture modeled after charcoal exudes a striking presence. The artist, Lee Bae, born in 1956, has been using charcoal as his primary motif since moving to France in 1989.

Lee has said that “charcoal harbors a power beyond human control,” and associates it with concepts such as “life and death” and “circulation.” In addition to the bronze sculpture, the gallery is showing his Brushstroke series, which furthers his exploration of charcoal. Beginning with burned raw wood, Lee layers his brushstrokes to capture the moment when material energy and human gesture intersect.

Also featured at the booth is an installation by Kim Taek-sang titled Moment, shown in the “Sato ‘Meadow’” section. —Naoya Raita

Pick up the phone, dial a number, and hear a poem read aloud. Dial-A-Poem is an interactive project launched by poet John Giorno in 1968, and is now one of MoMA’s most popular works.

The piece is deeply political. Inspired by movements such as the anti–Vietnam War protests, it includes works by radical poets and activists. Because of its content, it can be difficult to exhibit in countries with strict censorship. Its inclusion at Tokyo Gendai is therefore worth celebrating. —Asuka Kawanabe

Gana Art, with locations in Seoul and Los Angeles, is showing works by Berlin-based artist Andrew Moncrief, known for exploring themes such as queer identity, masculinity, and the idealized body. His booth includes paintings of fragmented figures.

One recurring motif is a hand holding a cigarette, said to be inspired by Philip Guston. For Moncrief, the hand symbolizes incomplete identities and the fragmented sensory experiences of contemporary life. Today, we interface with society largely through our hands—texting, scrolling, typing, smoking—and we’re also tethered to it through them.

Moncrief’s drawing of a hand rubbing a cigarette against the ground, as if drawing a line, reads as an attempt—despite pain—to disconnect from the addictive pull of modern life. —Shunta Ishigami

Participating in Tokyo Gendai for the first time, Copenhagen’s Formation Gallery is presenting new works by Danish artist Carl Krull. Many of the pieces were made during a recent residency in Japan, and this show marks his first exhibition in Asia.

Krull’s “Seismic” drawing technique creates layers of paint, forming topographic compositions from which figures seem to emerge, as if detected by sonar. Though made with paint, the works have a sculptural presence, their forms appearing to rise from beneath the surface.

Across from the booth, Krull is also presenting Vertex, a live drawing performance inspired by calligraphy, as part of “Sato ‘Meadow.’” One piece is created each day, for a total of four. —Nimisha Anand

Among the artists featured at Taka Ishii Gallery, which was described by Kohei Yamada and others as showing “relatively young artists,” one work stood out: a large abstract painting by Takumi Ogami, born in 2000 and a recent graduate of Kyoto University of the Arts.

Titled Untitled (2025), the painting features powerful contrasts between deep red, yellow, and black strokes that evoke a sense of painful struggle. For Ogami, painting is a practice of testing the boundaries between his own body and the external world—a process he describes as “intimidation.”

Upon closer inspection, the surface reveals a collage of rounded scans of stones collected by the artist, subtly disrupting the harmony of the composition. —Maya Nago

Two works by Tschabalala Self at Galerie Eva Presenhuber—Study of Odalisque under Shrub and Study of Odalisque in Landscape—stood out for their vibrant colors and layered fabrics. Warm tones of red and orange lend the canvases a sense of embrace, even as they confront viewers with the existence of an insurmountable divide.

Born in Harlem in 1990, Self works across painting, printmaking, and sculpture to examine Black female identity and physicality. Recurring features—braided hair, manicured nails, prominent buttocks—appear not as stereotypes. Instead, the images reconstruct them, critically questioning the image of black women.

Self’s take on the classical odalisque responds to centuries of subordination of the female form to the white male gaze. By centering the Black female figure, she returns power to the marginalized subject, presenting desire and oppression with new intensity. —Naoya Raita