Each month, Black Art in Japan brings together the Japanese art market news, exhibitions, sales, events, and research related to Black artistic production in Japan.
With the beginning of Art Week Tokyo in early November, the Tokyo art scene is—for once—particularly receptive to Black art, welcoming curators, artists, and exhibitions touching on all over the African diasporic world.
EXHIBITIONS
The Toyota Tsusho CFAO African Art Award, space Un & Ginza Tsutaya Books, Tokyo
Between the start of June 2026 and the end of April 2027, the touring exhibition of the Toyota CFAO Tsusho African Art Prize will be held across several countries: Togo, Japan and France.
I can ascertain one thing: this is an award exhibition with a strong, interesting first-hand potential, an opportunity for anyone to become acquainted with artists who are not yet household names — a refreshing and much needed contrast to the art usually seen in Japanese galleries and art spaces.
But there’s a certain frustration seeing a show from a multinational corporation that has been involved in Africa for 170 years, yet where the presentation feels confusing and where there is so little curatorial guidance. At space Un and Ginza Tsutaya Books, where the show is exhibited sequentially from October 23rd to November 3rd, the very limited selection of two works per artist (three for the grand prize winner), is aside from regrettable, simply not nearly enough to showcase any single artistic vision.
This lack of depth isn’t helped by any discernible curatorial intent, as the exhibition fails to elucidate how the works relate to one another, or engage with the Japanese context, and the two venues — each hosting it for a mere handful of days—ultimately leaves the entire presentation feeling flat and disconnected, more like a more like a corporate pop up event than a curated artistic presentation.
Mind you, this was not a small-scale, DIY-operation of lesser-known exhibitors, for some top-of-the-line curators and institutions and artists participated, with jury members including Chris Dercon, curator and museum and managing director of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; international writer, broadcaster and curator Ekow Eshun; or head curator for contemporary art and research Centre Pompidou Paris Alicia Knock.
Despite this, the show contains some strong work, especially the association of different media: Moffat Takadiwa’s sculptural works made from discarded materials, Gosette Lubondo’s exploration of memory through photography, Unathi Mkonto’s bent-wood sculptural pieces examining the relationship between space, form and lived experience, and the intimate, introspective portraits of Katlego C.L. Twala and Tizta Berhanu.
Through November 3, 2026.
Afro Asia Portal, The 5th Floor Gallery, Tokyo
The South Korean AfroAsia artist collective (CHE Onejoon, Sun A MOON) makes its Tokyo debut with a solo show that celebrates the ties between the African, Afro-descendant, and Korean communities of Bosan-dong in Dongducheon and Paju.
The exhibition title, Portal: AfroAsia, with its passage and encounter connotations, emphasizes this same idea of bridging communities: it is a powerful way to foster dialogue between Afro-Asian and Japanese-Korean art scenes, but also to encourage the mobility and access of artists and audiences across these different contexts. Across many regions and countries, these groups have been subject to exclusion, displacement, colonialism, militarization and migration, but here, each work gives memory a place, while also helping us envision an Afrofuturist world where transnational solidarity between Africa and Asia shapes new forms of belonging.
In the first room, the portraits of local community members portraits hung onto the walls are not merely a documentary gesture. They are acts of collective thinking — ways of encoding ancestral histories, embodied experience, and collective history into image. In another room, AfroZia: Pow Pow (2025), a video installation—surrounded by six portraits of female dancers—illustrates how music can be a way to create bridges between cultures, eras, and practices. The presentation reveals new perspectives for looking at cross-border dialogue, offering a fresh model for international artistic collaboration.
Walking through this small yet rich show, one can tell it provides a comprehensive overview of the subject and of Afro-asian growing significance within the contemporary art world. With political rhetoric worldwide thriving on the promise of “securing borders”, trading on discomfort and fear about the contingency, or fragility, of the line between what is understood as “inside” and “outside”, eyes are on artists who make us rethink “otherness” and who continue to keep a channel open between distant places.
Through November 29, 2026.
How Much Light Must I Consume?, space Un, Tokyo
For his Tokyo debut, Sierra Leone-born interdisciplinary artist Julianknxx continues his exploration of his own history as a prism to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, history, and culture.
Working at the intersection of poetry, visual art, and filmmaking, Julianknxx approaches salt not simply as a material, but as the binding force that ties together colonial history, and diasporic experience: a substance that holds both trauma and healing in the same place.
Curated by Ekow Eshun, in his second show at space Un, the exhibition brings together sculptures, photographs, and films in which salt is both substance and symbol. What Colours Can We Dream in This Night Filled with Salt? draws on Comorian lullabies kept alive by the Boras Choir—a women’s vocal ensemble of Comorian origin—and shapes the film around the repetitions and shifting tones of the human voice. Here, salt becomes a bridge between the personal and the historical, tying the body, displacement, loss, and nourishment to the violent legacies of colonial trade.
Through January 24, 2027.
Blue Keys, Kotaro Nukaga, Zakkein, Myoshinji Temple, Kyoto
Tavares Strachan (b. 1979, Nassau, the Bahamas) has developed a practice at the intersection of history, science, introspection and politics.
The exhibition, held at Zakkein, a sub-temple of Myoshin-ji, brings together a new body of word-search paintings in which Strachan continues his exploration of visibility and invisibility through countless letters in indigo, black and blue set against dark backgrounds. Alongside the paintings, the sound of a West African balafon, played by a robotic array of mallets on resonating wooden keys, creates a space for the viewer to be completely enveloped in the rhythms developed by the artist.
Taking as a point of departure one of his childhood memories: watching his grandmother solve word searches—scanning grids of letters until words surfaced from them—Strachan resists the erasure of memory, asking what history chooses to remember and what it means to read between the lines. He pays tribute to what has been erased from, if not never acknowledged by, our collective memory, but beyond this, questions our humanity and our conscience.
A powerful show that refutes passive contemplation, Blue Keys is an invitation to give form to what has been forgotten and to force a dialogue with our own humanity.
Through November 19, 2026.
Lorna Simpson, Oscaar Mouligne | Hauser & Wirth, Daitoku-ji, Kyoto
Oscaar Mouligne presents a solo exhibition of Lorna Simpson’s work that reveals how her paintings, her collages and her wider oeuvre are in correspondence with one another. Alongside it, a special presentation co-organized with Hauser & Wirth is on view at Daiko-in, a Zen Buddhist subtemple of Daitoku-ji.
Marking Simpson’s first solo exhibition in Japan since 1999, the show continues the artist’s enduring engagement with questions of identity, memory, gender, race, representation and the body, themes that take on a particular resonance in a society often described as homogeneous and marked by strong gender norms. Honoring the artist’s connection with Japan, Interpretations (2026) draws directly on Hasegawa Takejirō’s The Boy Who Drew Cats, a Japanese folktale Simpson’s mother read to her as a child.
Japanese audiences were first introduced to Simpson’s work in Lorna Simpson: Simultaneity at the CCA Kitakyushu Project Gallery in 1999, where the artist showed conceptual photographic works and lithographs, including Waterfall (1999). Eschewing a sweeping retrospective presentation, the Oscaar Mouligne exhibition introduces them to her work of the past five years, bringing together the monumental painting Lightning (2021) and two series of collages.
Oscaar Mouligne, which opened in 2023 with a solo exhibition by Glenn Ligon, thus continues to bring major Black American artists to Japanese audiences.
Through March 6, 2027
EVENTS
Arthur Jafa and Theaster Gates, Tokyo Jazz Club
From November 1 to 8, Tokyo Jazz Club welcomes local and international galleries to the former capsule hotel building in Kanda-Nishikicho. Highlights include SADIE COLES HQ’s presentation of Arthur Jafa, a listening session by the artist, and a talk between Jafa and Theaster Gates on November 5, who has also been particularly influential in the Japanese art scene with his Afro-mingei practice.
© Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Zanele Muholi, T3 Photo Festival Tokyo
T3 Photo Festival Tokyo showcases South African artist Zanele Muholi in a solo exhibition with a special focus on her signature series Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness. Her works, gathered at Tofrom Yaesu Tower, capture the beauty and strength of African (female) bodies, which have long been objectified, othered and exoticized.
Through October 26, 2026.
Julianknxx, Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo
Julianknxx will present a choral performance on November 6, 2026, from 4:30 to 5:10 PM.
ART AUCTIONS
SBI Modern and Contemporary Art Sale
Works by Black artists remain rare at auction in the Japanese art market, but one of October’s highlights was Jerrell Gibbs’s Anniversary Brunch, offered at SBI Art Auction’s Modern and Contemporary Art sale.
ART FAIRS
In Praise of Shadows: The Aesthetics of Reinterpretation, Arthur Jafa, Art Collaboration Kyoto
On November 8, as part of ACK Talks at Art Collaboration Kyoto, American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa will give a talk titled In Praise of Shadows: The Aesthetics of Reinterpretation, which takes its name from Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay.
RESEARCH
Nakamura Yuko’s review of The World as Seen from the Kibera the Slum (Art Center BUG, Tokyo, April 25–May 31, 2026).
In this review, Nakamura examines The World as Seen from the Kibera the Slum, shown at Tokyo’s Art Center BUG in the spring of 2026. Organized by Miggy Sakata, the exhibition gives artists from Kibera, a Nairobi community that has long been photographed by outsiders, the opportunity to define themselves on their own terms.
Drawing on her viewing of the works and commentary from the organizer, Nakamura takes a close look at several pieces to provide an overview of how West African photography was “picked up” by Western curators and collectors and gained recognition as “fine art.” These include Vin sekani’s Objects on the Mirror May Look Closer Than They Are, which, in her reading, shows how the lingering effects of the colonial past and the post-independence state’s struggles still weigh on an individual’s personal and professional life.
However, she argues that some figures are challenging these Western-centered dynamics and working to return control of African art to Africa. One example is Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh, who in 2010, founded Addis Foto Fest, East Africa’s first international photography festival.
Nakamura concludes that, despite the art world’s frequent neglect of places like Kibera and the patronizing attitudes toward their artists, including in Japan, this exhibition shows that artists from marginalized communities can claim a place for themselves through expression.