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Sales at Tokyo Gendai Reflect an Evolving Market Surprisingly Resistant to Trend-Chasing

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Bird view of a crowded fair floor with booths and a giant sculpture of a girl with blue hairTokyo Gendai 2026 runs at Pacifico Yokohama, Tokyo, through September 13. Courtesy Tokyo Gendai

Tokyo Gendai opened to VIPs yesterday (Sept. 10) with 69 galleries, including 30 international exhibitors, for the final time at Pacifico Yokohama. The fair will move to the more central Ariake GYM-EX in 2027, aligning it more closely with Art Week Tokyo and Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK). Sharing the news of the shift over Mori Bar’s signature martini earlier this week, Magnus Renfrew, the fair’s co-founder, told Observer that a venue change had been in the works for some time, but securing a space on those dates proved difficult. “Venues in Tokyo are incredibly challenging to find when you’re trying to organize something of this scale and ambition,” he said, adding that the feedback so far has been positive. “Everybody feels that being in Tokyo, and being there at a time when everything is happening simultaneously, is going to be a very powerful draw and generate a lot of attention.”

Japan’s art market has been growing steadily even as neighboring markets have stalled. Following a 38 percent drop in 2020, it rebounded to $756 million in 2022 and has since stabilized. Sales reached $692 million in 2024, up 2 percent year over year, even as global sales declined by 12 percent, according to The Japanese Art Market 2025 report prepared by art-market economist Clare McAndrew as part of the FY2025 Art Ecosystem Infrastructure Development Promotion Project commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Since Tokyo Gendai launched in 2023, international galleries, including Pace and Ceysson & Bénétière, have opened spaces in Tokyo, while a new generation of Japanese galleries has helped expand the ecosystem in the capital and elsewhere, becoming increasingly visible at international fairs.

Long-established institutions such as the Mori Art Museum continue to demonstrate the strength of Japan’s top-level museum programming, but other local museums have also adopted a more international outlook, increasingly collaborating with institutions across the region. Last year, for example, a vast survey of recent decades of Japanese art, “Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010,” was jointly organized by the National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT) and M+ in Hong Kong, while the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) contributed to the production of the major Do Ho Suh survey now at MMCA Seoul, before it lands, slightly smaller, in Tokyo and closes its tour at M+. Meanwhile, in tandem with the fair, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) is hosting an extensive Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition featuring approximately 60 gelatin-silver photographs spanning his early work in the late 1970s through the present.

New private museums and collections have also opened in Tokyo and around the Japanese peninsula in recent years. Perhaps most impressive is the Ueshima Museum, which showcases the collection of Japanese entrepreneur Kankuro Ueshima. Ueshima began collecting in 2022 and opened his own museum just two years later. Today, the collection numbers more than 850 works, ranging from emerging Japanese artists to extremely recent acquisitions by internationally established names, including some works one might have previously encountered only at Art Basel, in Venice or in New York. Currently hanging in the museum, for example, is a monumental Nigel Cooke canvas from his exhibition at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, alongside works by Alicja Kwade and Raqib Shaw acquired directly from their most recent exhibitions in New York.

A row of large circular illuminated sculptures glows amber in a mirrored gallery space, their reflections multiplying across the walls.Olafur Eliasson’s Eye see you (2006) at Ueshima Museum, Tokyo. Courtesy the artist and Ueshima Museum

“The galleries, artists and cultural institutions shaping the market continuously produce world-class projects and programs, and Tokyo Gendai’s mission is to connect that energy with global audiences,” Renfrew said during a press conference. “The creativity emerging from Japan’s galleries, studios and institutions is what gives this fair its purpose, and it is a privilege to help bring the work to the fair.”

Most importantly, he said, that connection doesn’t end when the fair doors close but drives new projects and collaborations throughout the year, resulting in longer-term cross-cultural exchange. One can see how this manifests in Mari Katayama, a photographer and performer whose work hangs in the VIP lounge and who has gained considerable momentum since the last Tokyo Gendai, where she presented with YKG. The exposure helped initiate what she described as a whirlwind year, now culminating in an upcoming museum presentation alongside Mariko Mori’s long-overdue and largest survey since 2003.

Looking at the broader context, Tokyo Gendai takes place in a Japan that has benefited from considerable political and economic stability, which has in turn contributed to collector confidence, according to director Eri Takane. At the same time, the Japanese art market is anchored by a collecting culture that has developed over decades and is driven more by passion than speculation, having already experienced the consequences of an earlier bubble. “We have had around 50 years of history in the gallery business in Japan,” she said. “I think the collectors are not really investors. They’re buying from passion.” That has helped insulate the market from the trend-driven bubbles seen elsewhere. “I think that’s the beauty of it. It’s not really trendy, like a bubble; it’s very stable.”

In a move toward greater accessibility and transparency, Tokyo Gendai introduced an online catalog this year that openly lists a price range for each work, helping generate early sales and holds before opening day. It’s likely a smart move as a younger generation of Japanese collectors is beginning to reshape the ecosystem, coinciding with a broader generational transfer within Japanese family businesses. As second-generation heirs assume greater responsibility and gain greater independence in decision-making, Takane expects their more international education and exposure to filter increasingly into their collecting and anticipates “some of those international tastes and other forms of exposure are going to start coming through.”

And rather than limiting themselves to acquiring art, some younger collectors are establishing communities, curatorial platforms and residency opportunities for artists and curators. According to Tokyo-based collector Yu Kimoto, older Japanese collectors often approach art as a long-term investment, but he and his peers tend to be guided more by curiosity and enjoyment than financial calculation. “If it turns out to be valuable, that’s great,” he said in a recent interview with Observer. “If not, that’s totally fine.” He’s emblematic of a generation whose collecting has been shaped by relationships and research conducted online as much as in person, across art and design, street culture and other collectibles. As part of the Tokyo Gendai VIP program, Kimoto opened his newly renovated and elegantly curated Omotesando apartment to visitors, showcasing an outstanding collection of Isamu Noguchi’s Akari lamps alongside work by established contemporary talents like Tom Sachs and KAWS.

The newly introduced Miki (“Trunk”) section, dedicated to works on paper including photography, drawing and prints; Tane (“Seed”), devoted specifically to digital media including NFTs, animation, film, AR, VR and gaming; and Hana (“Flower”), focused on emerging talent, are a bid to attract younger and newer collectors looking for work at lower price points. At the same time, younger dealers increasingly arrive from outside the conventional gallery system, bringing backgrounds in other creative industries, often coupled with experience studying or living abroad and fluency in English. “They’re really smart. They don’t limit themselves to focusing only on the gallery,” Takane said.

A CON_ booth at Tokyo Gendai presenting a series of atmospheric figurative paintings in muted gray, cream and brown tones, including several close-up portraits arranged across white walls.Yukino Yamanaka presented by CON__ at Tokyo Gendai 2026. Courtesy CON__

Hisatomo Kato, the force behind CON_, for example, works fluidly across art, music and fashion. Fresh from a successful Frieze Seoul debut the previous week, Kato is presenting Yukino Yamanaka in Hana. Through the fluidity of paint, Yamanaka’s subjects hover between self and other, probing the endless possibilities of constructing and reconstructing identity across digital and physical space. Faces and bodies dissolve into ambiguous forms, capturing metamorphosis itself and pushing against the boundaries of the conventional human archetype. By the VIP preview, the gallery had sold more than five paintings, each priced under $10,000, all to private collections. Kato described it as a homecoming of sorts. “We are presenting a Tokyo painter, a Tokyo gallery, at a Tokyo fair. Collectors responded to the quiet intensity of her small canvases from the first hour, and it is encouraging to see a fair in Japan building this kind of momentum for emerging artists.”

Meanwhile, rising Osaka dealer Marco Gallery straddles both Hana and Sato with a solo presentation of wood-carved fantastical horses by Yiru Saruchudo, an artist born in Mongolia and now studying in Tokyo who is attracting attention for an impressive exercise in world-building through craft and organic materials. Titled “Echoes of Life” and rooted in memories of the Mongolian plateau, with its vast expanses of sky and grass, the presentation treats wood not simply as material but as an integral element in a broader proposition about alternative ways of living symbiotically with nature. The surfaces retain traces of chainsaws, chisels and carving tools alongside the natural bark of the trees, continually entangling the artificial with the natural, the human with the nonhuman. With prices below $25,000, several red dots had appeared on the gallery’s checklist by evening. Behind Marco Gallery is Toshimitsu Komoda, who brings a background in law alongside a rigorous gallery program grounded in research and curated presentations, an approach that has helped the gallery begin participating in international fairs while building its artists’ careers.

The horse also becomes an allegory for mounting tensions between humans and nature and for the existential weight of contemporary life in the work of young Atami-based Syozo Taniguchi, presented in Hana by HARUKAITO by ISLAND, in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the gallery. Priced between $10,000 and $20,000, the booth was sold out by the evening.

Tokyo Gendai’s Hana section feels particularly expansive this year, demonstrating the vibrancy of the country’s emerging talent, whose distinctive visual languages make the trip worthwhile for international visitors. One of the few truly meteoric hyper-contemporary rises of the past year has been Yu Nishimura, whose imagination and visual vocabulary remain deeply anchored in Japanese culture even as that culture has influenced generations around the world.

Yiru Saruchudo at Marco Gallery.Yiru Saruchudo at Marco Gallery. Photo: Katsura Komiyama

This year’s Hana Award went to Soh Souen, a Japanese artist in his thirties whose remarkably mature practice spans performance, video, installation and painting. His work feels truly distinctive within the Japanese art scene today while still linking back to earlier generations of experimental approaches to the body, from Gutai to Yoko Ono and the late Yayoi Kusama‘s earliest work. Souen’s practice enacts something like an ontology of the body, testing the fragile, porous boundaries that govern interpersonal relationships and communication, often perceived as immovable in a society as conservative as Japan remains in many respects.

Soh Souen is presented by AWASE Gallery, a very young space in the heart of Shinjuku that has, in less than a year, distinguished itself through the rigor of its curation and programming. Behind it are architect Riku Matsui and artist Kohei Yamada, who describe a focus on pioneering practices operating at the intersection of visual art, architecture and media culture. The Hana Award provides $10,000 (approximately ¥1.5 million) in cash, along with special recognition during the fair.

Korean gallery Nagoda’s booth is presenting Agnes So’s uniquely magnetic work made from hand-dyed silk, brass nails and thousands of interconnected threads. Created in the 1980s via a labor-intensive process that can exceed 1,000 hours per work, the pieces are only now being presented publicly, after the artist deliberately waited to observe how their materials would evolve over time. The dyed textiles and threads composing these rhythmically intricate geometric structures have shifted in tone and gradient, while the nails holding them together have oxidized, introducing new textures, chromatic movements and mineral elements. Time has essentially become another medium in the works, one that continues to shape compositions that remain in an unstable, ongoing state of transformation. For this reason, none of the large pieces are for sale. The artist might, at most, consider a stewardship arrangement with someone prepared to care for the works as they continue to evolve. The smaller pieces, meanwhile, are priced at $8,000.

A gallery installation combining figurative and abstract works, including a large copper-toned composition, a vertical close-up of a navel and a video screen showing a person’s mouth.Soh Souen, presented by AWASE Gallery, won fair’s 2026 Hana Award. Courtesy Tokyo Gendai

Among the international participants, Los Angeles-based Jacob Arthur Gallery returns to Tokyo Gendai for a second time, doubling down amid an intense back-to-back fair schedule with the glittering work of Dan Life. Last year, the gallery sold its largest and most expensive piece within the first two hours, a Yves Klein-inspired blue Nike sculpture priced at $300,000, to a local collector, founder David Dontsis told Observer, making the return trip worthwhile.

This time, the booth centers on a glittering Nike sneaker; four others were sold earlier this year for $120,000 each to a former Nike CEO. But the gallery is also debuting a new artist, Arthell Isom, an American who moved to Japan to study animation in Osaka and became one of the relatively few international artists admitted into the country’s animation studios, later working on productions including Attack on Titan, One Piece and Star Wars: Visions. After visiting his Tokyo studio last year, Dotsis became obsessed with Isom’s never-before-seen watercolors. Several now hang at the fair, priced at $3,000 each, with early interest from Miami clients, although the gallery hoped to sell them on-site. By the end of day one, nine works by Dan Life had sold, with a returning collector from last year breaking the ice by buying a Doraemon-inspired piece and the top sale priced at $45,000. Most buyers were local, with others coming from Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, another Tokyo gallery steadily building a notable roster of younger talents, is presenting Yuki Mori’s delicate works on traditional paper and wood, with minimal pigment, centered on imaginative reinterpretations of people and plants. In some of her most successful compositions, bodies and botanical forms dissolve into surreal, fluid entities, entering a metaphorical state of symbiosis in which people merge with other people, with plants or with the surrounding environment. Priced between $3,000 and $6,000 at the current dollar-yen conversion, Mori is another recently emerging name beginning to circulate internationally, having appeared in exhibitions at AtlaS in L.A. and Nina Johnson in Miami.

The gallery pairs her work with Kako Shirahata’s enigmatic paintings, part of a more audacious series in which the artist reinterprets the ancient gesture of anasyrma, a practice in which a woman lifts her garments to expose her genitals, as an act of resistance against the structures of the unidirectional gaze.

Nearby, Kamakura Gallery is presenting another promising talent, Rikako Kawauchi. Her viscerally tactile, expressively gestural handling of the surface recalls Gutai, but she then cuts through that accumulated material with intuitive precision. Figures, flowers and human bodies emerge from the excavation of dense, almost magmatic layers of paint. A large drawing nearby reveals just how resolute and powerfully evocative her line can be as she establishes an intuitive, diaristic narrative across the surface. With prices under $10,000, several works had been placed by evening.

Tokyo-based NANZUKA, meanwhile, is staging a dense group presentation that conceals several genuine discoveries. Among them is the very early-career Liang Yuyue, a Chinese artist currently studying in Japan whose work draws on antique Chinese literature and mythology while absorbing Japanese manga and contemporary visual language. Her gestural strokes dissolve figures into luminous rays of light and kaleidoscopic reflections until bodies and surroundings seem to merge into a single flow of energy and matter.

Qin Feng’s installation with Art of Nature at Tokyo Gendai 2026. Courtesy the artist and Art of Nature

A similarly cosmic and intergalactic atmosphere permeates the symbolically dense compositions of another promising Chinese artist in the booth, Zigsen Liu. Here, the psychological fluidity of figures caught in continuous metamorphosis emerges from a contemplation of contemporary existence and the increasingly fragmented nature of a self shaped by multiple reflections and fractal projections across digital, physical, psychological and sensory space. Works by both artists reach up to $10,000 but mostly remain in the low thousands.

Also grabbing attention between Hana and Sato is Art of Nature’s presentation, centered on a monumental traditional ink painting on a scroll, transformed into both a poetic installation and a philosophical proposition about the relationship between humans and nature. Chinese artist Qin Feng expands the traditional technique into a more immersive form of storytelling, surrounding the scroll with painted traditional fans from his Pragmatism Philosophy series. Exploring human civilization, history and shifting values through expressive brushwork and ink, the works reach $30,000 for the largest piece and installation. More decorative is Wu Guanzhen’s floral composition, which inventively reintroduces lacquer and gold-and-silver leaf into paintings priced between $30,000 and $50,000.

Japanese gallery Kotaro Nukaga had one of the fair’s most crowded booths, with several large new canvases by internationally rising Japanese artist Keita Morimoto. His Hopperian hyperrealism is animated by a pervasive nostalgia for a Japan that seemed to slip away while the artist spent years abroad, only to appear transformed each time he returned. His works are now priced around $50,000, considerably above the levels at which he first began showing with smaller galleries in the U.S., as Morimoto prepares for a major museum exhibition in Kyoto and a show in Paris with Almine Rech.

By evening, Nukaga reported selling more than 20 works between preview day and presales ahead of the fair’s public opening. Among the top transactions was a large work by Tomokazu Matsuyama, Dearly Beloved Noir, priced at $250,000-300,000, alongside a new José Parlá painting priced at $60,000-100,000 and one of Annie Morris’s highly sought-after stacked-sphere sculptures at $100,000-150,000. Both new Morimoto paintings, priced at $40,000-60,000 each, also sold. Emerging and mid-career works priced under $10,000 likewise attracted strong interest. Both works by Akiko Ueda, whose oscillating fractal abstractions resemble explosions of pixels, found buyers, as did Tomona Matsukawa’s still-life bar scene, a sculptural work by Takeshi Yasura and several paintings by Rei Kizumoto. Both of Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho’s playfully conceptual paintings sold as the artist introduced Japanese characters and language into his work for the first time. Buyers were predominantly based in Japan, Nukaga noted, although several presales were concluded with overseas collectors who first expressed interest at Frieze Seoul, resulting in a strong Asia-centered response across the gallery’s intense two-week fair circuit.

Another Japanese powerhouse, A Lighthouse called Kanata, sold works by Ayane Mikagi, Shuhei Takahara, Kiyo Hasegawa and Chiko Takei to collections in North America, Europe and Asia.

Photo by Osamu Sakamoto, Courtesy of Artists and KOTARO NUKAGAKutaro Nukaga at Tokyo Gendai 2026. Photo by Osamu Sakamoto, courtesy the artists and KOTARO NUKAGA

Among the major international galleries, Pace confirmed its commitment to the fair despite a recent downsizing of its operations, maintaining a prominent Tokyo space since 2024. This time, the gallery is presenting a solo booth of new works by Lauren Quin. The digital quality of her abstractions, combined with the gestural materiality of their surfaces, feels particularly well suited to Japanese audiences. The booth was almost sold out by the evening.

Sadie Coles HQ, meanwhile, could hardly skip Tokyo at this point, given that it represents one of Japan’s brightest rising stars, Yu Nishimura, alongside David Zwirner and Crèvecœur. In the booth, Nishimura’s large new woodland portrait Diffraction (2026) is presented in dialogue with Sarah Lucas’s Bad Bunny. Elsewhere are works by Matthew Barney, abstractions by Uri Aran, a large neon and Ju Li’s more existential sculptures, among others.

More minimal and abstract is Ceysson & Bénétière’s booth, returning for its third year at the fair while the French gallery maintains a permanent space in Tokyo. The presentation includes a beautifully engraved fire extinguisher and a Disney-inspired drawing by Wim Delvoye, who is currently exhibiting at the gallery. Prices range from four to five figures. Particularly popular among local collectors are Lionel Sabatté’s sculptures. His small, clay-like bird, Colombe, priced at around €4,000, was already reserved, though collectors continued to ask about it. Similar works by the artist had sold out at Art Basel Paris last year.

Meanwhile, the sophistication of Japanese taste is also evident in the appreciation for text-based and conceptual work by artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Marcel Broodthaers. The Broodthaers estate is presenting works here with Taro Nasu, as it did in Hong Kong and Seoul, shown in dialogue with the giant black spheres of Ryan Gander’s Can You Be Happy. An additional work by Weiner is installed beside the VIP lounge.

Missing from the fair this year is a Japanese heavyweights as SCAI The Bathhouse, but Kaikai Kiki maintains a prominent presence near the entrance with a group presentation dominated by the gallery’s familiar anime- and manga-inflected aesthetic. Another side of the booth has been transformed by Mr., with his characters spilling across the wallpaper and onto a customized “Yankee Itasha” car. Prices range from around $7,000 for smaller works to $300,000 for the car.

Mr.’s world-building extends beyond the booth into Sato Meadow, where his monumental installation That Day’s Never-Ending “Let’s Spend the Night Together”—Off the Chart (2026) brings together a monumental kawaii student sculpture, customized motorcycles and a vending machine, a constellation of symbols from a Japan that has become intimately familiar to the imagination of an entire generation of Millennials exposed to its visual culture, even from afar.

A pink car with anime charactersMr. with Kai Kai Kiki at Tokyo Gendai 2026. Courtesy Tokyo Gendai

Directly opposite, Mizuma Art Gallery, which operates in Tokyo and Singapore, offers two sharply contrasting visions of contemporary Japanese fantasy. Ayane Eguchi’s bucolic paintings conjure pastel, unicorn-populated dream worlds, with several selling early for under $5,000. Satoru Aoyama’s TIME (THE END OF HUMANITY) (2026), by contrast, adopts a considerably more apocalyptic register: made from polyester and luminous thread, the embroidered textile work unfolds into a lucid meditation on humanity’s fragility and the archaeological remains through which its story might one day be reconstructed.

Overall, Tokyo Gendai maintained a steady flow of visitors from opening to closing of its VIP day, with numerous executives brought in through banking partner SMBC, soon joined by a younger audience of collectors from Japan and across the broader Asian region. Korean collectors’ attendance, in particular, appeared notably stronger this year, as they were still energized rather than deterred by the art week the week before.

Yet the fair’s generous, spacious booths kept the atmosphere from becoming too hectic and crowded, leaving breathing room between presentations and allowing space for the more ambitious installation-based projects in Sato, as well as a substantial performance program staged throughout the fair among the booths.

Among the installations scattered through Sato Meadow is Tanabe Chikuunsai IV’s woven-bamboo construction, Circulation, a smaller counterpart to the room-filling architectural bamboo work he is currently presenting at Frieze House Seoul with leading Kyoto dealer Yumekoubou Gallery. The second son of the third-generation Chikuunsai, he encountered bamboo from an early age and eventually pushed a craft tradition passed down through generations toward a new form of contemporary expression. Yumekoubou itself embodies a similar generational evolution, extending a family antiques business into the contemporary field.

On the opposite side of the fair, closer to the VIP lounge, TAEX is presenting two large-scale video installations, including a new work produced with Marina Abramović, Slow Walking. The monumental LED wall installation and limited-edition digital artwork premiered as part of “Transforming Energy” at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice during the 61st Venice Biennale, where it formed part of a 30-meter immersive presentation. Now presented by TAEX at Tokyo Gendai, the radically decelerated image transforms walking into a meditation on duration, heightened awareness and the possibilities of digital performance. Additional works by Abramović from the series are presented inside the booth. At its first Tokyo Gendai, the curated digital art platform and marketplace appears confident that Japan could provide fertile ground for this kind of work.

Nearby, another screen presents the digital mythology of Zhang Xu Zhan’s Termite Feeding Show, a two-channel video that interlaces the climate crisis, energy disasters, fantasies of the Anthropocene and a sci-fi fable of insect diets through the perspective of termites. An edition of three of six is priced at $2,000 excluding VAT.

Also in the new digital section, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art is presenting a solo booth devoted to Ryoichi Kurokawa’s multilayered digital practice. Kurokawa constructs a continuum between the pulsing frequencies and rhythmic data visualizations of his audiovisual sculptures and more delicate lightboxes, in which dried flowers are overlaid with intricate linear structures representing the machine’s attempt to map, chart and mathematically redesign the obscure perfection of the natural world. Each is priced at $6,400. Kurokawa was among the earlier Japanese artists to explore the increasingly intertwined digital and physical dimensions of contemporary experience, gaining international institutional recognition from the 2000s onward. His work has been presented at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Pinakothek der Moderne, ZKM, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, among others. He also participated in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and won the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2010 for Digital Musics & Sound Art.

Marina Abramovich walking in a red suitTAEX at Tokyo Gendai 2026. Courtesy TAEX

By its fourth edition, Tokyo Gendai has established itself as a fast-maturing international platform capable of catalyzing greater visibility for Japanese artists and galleries within the wider global art ecosystem. Its move to Tokyo should further amplify that role by focusing international attention on a local scene whose momentum is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. “You can really feel that it is happening,” AMA CEO Scott Gray told Observer on opening day, noting that the fair arrived at precisely the moment when Japan appeared ready for it. Still, as with India Art Fair, an important part of its success has been remaining deeply embedded within its local ecosystem.

Tokyo Gendai is, first and foremost, a Japanese international fair built around Japan’s art ecosystem. Its ambition has never been simply to create another Frieze but to establish a platform through which Japanese artists and galleries can gain greater international visibility. Even as some international galleries, including Almine Rech and Perrotin, have dropped out, and their regional rosters often overlap with those of leading local galleries, while sales remain concentrated below six figures and frequently in the low five figures or below, Tokyo Gendai still demonstrates the vibrancy of Japan’s art ecosystem. For international and regional visitors interested in understanding what is happening in the country now, it has become a key point of entry.

More international collectors, especially from within the region, are also making the trip. Among those spotted around the fair were Evan Chow, Tim Tam and Monique Leong. “I wasn’t expecting anything from the fair. But I was surprised by the turnout and saw many international collectors. I’m looking forward to seeing them again next year when they move to Tokyo,” Tam commented as he exited.

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