Art in Tokyo

I'm travelling to Japan for the first time next week with my band. Can anyone recommend good galleries to visit for contemporary art in Tokyo?

I'm already planning on going to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see the Cartier Foundation thing. I'm pretty excited about this but I imagine there are some smaller places worth seeing too. I'm particularly interested in new media stuff, as Tokyo is meant to be hot for this sort of thing. But I'm opened minded and looking for anything interesting and/or insane and/or beautiful.

Advice anyone?
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
tokyo is incredibly big and not easy to navigate, especially if you don't read/speak jap.
my advise is to leach on to any local who looks reasonably clued up and speaks foreign
languages (there's surprisingly few of those). milk them for all the information you can
get out of them. i found people working in record stores, clubs and galleries to be
good sources of recommendations. there's also a couple of english language newspapers
like this and some others that i can't
remember right now. great nightlife too, though also not easy to find.

have fun, it's an amazing place! i hope i can go back there soon!
 

Eric

Mr Moraigero
There are a bunch of galleries down around Ginza/Shinbashi. They will have gallery maps and such but you kind of have to know who does what in order to avoid places selling fake impressionist painting and so on. I dont have any specific suggestions but Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills has good exhibitions sometimes. I went down and saw a Hiroshi Sugimoto show which was excellent a few months ago. I could help more re nightlife if you want that but I am not much of a gallery crawler.
 
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