Art Week Tokyo runs 4–8 November across 56 venues, with AWT Focus now dispersed around the city. This selective two-cluster route pairs focused gallery visits with one major museum survey.
Art Week Tokyo opens on Wednesday, 4 November, and runs through Sunday, 8 November 2026. The official 2026 programme spans a record 56 venues: ten AWT Focus spaces, 14 institutions and 32 galleries. Its most useful change for a short visit is also its most demanding. AWT Focus has moved out of a single central venue and into ten curator-led projects across ten Tokyo spaces.
This is a route, not a directory. It pairs two stops in the north of the city with two around Roppongi and Azabu, favouring exhibitions that have a precise reason to be seen in Tokyo now.
The dispersed Focus format makes the city part of the viewing experience. As The Art Newspaper's report on the new model explains, the 2025 edition occupied the Okura Museum of Art; this year, ten curators have each shaped a project in a different gallery or art space. The visitor gains ten distinct settings and points of view, but only by resisting the urge to cross Tokyo for every name on the programme.
The official event schedule lists AWT Focus from 4 to 8 November, 10am–6pm, with free admission. The organiser notes that some Focus venues have limited capacity, so a brief call ahead is sensible for a tightly scheduled day.
Start on Route A with Ace of Hearts, a new site-specific project by UK-based Japanese artist Nobuko Tsuchiya, curated by Camden Art Centre director Martin Clark. The SCAI The Bathhouse exhibition page describes a field of new sculptures assembled from materials including metal, resin, wire, felt and found objects. Their precarious physical presence should register particularly well inside SCAI's 200-year-old former public bathhouse in Yanaka.
At Route A stop A-4, Julie Boukobza's Portrait of Sculpture turns Erika Verzutti's drawings into the main event. The official project account explains that the Brazilian artist makes oil monoprints after her sculptures have left the studio, treating them as portraits or afterlives of objects now dispersed among other homes. It is an intimate counterpoint to the scale of the week. A current independent Tokyo exhibitions guide also identifies Verzutti and Tsuchiya among the edition's Focus highlights.
Begin the second cluster at Mori Art Museum on Route D. All That Shines is Mori's first major retrospective in Japan since 2002, bringing together 40 works spanning more than three decades, from her 1990s cyborg photographs and videos to large-scale installations shaped by technology, cosmology and Buddhist thought. The exhibition was organised with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
If Wave UFO is a priority, arrive with a plan. The brainwave-responsive work admits three visitors per session, and the museum's participation guide says places are limited and allocated in order of arrival. Visitors who do not enter the pod can see its imagery and film in a simulation dome.
Continue to Route D stop D-6 for Everyday Life, curated by Maria Brewińska. Tokyo-born Kamoji moved to Poland in 1959 and became closely associated with its postwar avant-garde. The Take Ninagawa project page centres the exhibition on survival, dignity and repeated everyday gestures, expressed through spare materials and works including A Room in Auschwitz (2026), Draught (1975/2026) and The Well (2026). It is the quietest selection here, and perhaps the one that most rewards unhurried looking.
The free hop-on, hop-off AWT Bus operates only from Friday, 6 November, through Sunday, 8 November. According to the official bus timetable and wristband instructions, buses run every 15 minutes from 10am to 6pm; each free wristband is valid for unlimited rides on the day it is collected. On 4 or 5 November, plan the same clusters by rail or taxi instead.
Participating galleries and all Focus projects are free, while museums remain ticketed. A wristband shown at the museum counter reduces admission to All That Shines to ¥2,500 on 4–6 November and ¥2,700 on 7–8 November; Art Week Tokyo's museum-rate page specifies that the reduction does not apply to online purchases.
Four stops over two days leave room to look rather than merely check in. Route A supplies the more tactile, gallery-scale encounters; Route D joins a career-spanning museum survey to Kamoji's restrained meditation on ordinary life. That contrast is a more persuasive portrait of Art Week Tokyo than any attempt to complete all 56 venues.
