About SCAI The Bathhouse

SCAI The Bathhouse is a contemporary art gallery located in Yanaka, with a town ambience reminiscent of Old Tokyo. In walking proximity to Ueno, an area dense with museums and art colleges, the gallery is housed in a venerable public bath imbued with a 200-year history. Take one step inside, and you find a white cube and mortar floor with soft natural light descending from the high ceiling. Treasuring the past while updating the space for the future, SCAI has been familiar to both local and international visitors as a center for the latest contemporary art.

Since its establishment in 1993, SCAI The Bathhouse has realized numerous exhibitions, commission projects and public works. It fosters the careers of the most vanguard artists: from Lee Ufan, a lead figure of Mono-ha school at the genesis of contemporary art in Japan, to Toshikatsu Endo and Mariko Mori, whose large-scale sculptures evoke unfolding narratives and garner international attention. SCAI is also establishing a global presence for the next-generation talent, such as sculptors Kohei Nawa and Nobuko Tsuchiya. Through their association with SCAI, artists such as Anish Kapoor, Bosco Sodi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and He Xiangyu have produced new series of works inspired by Japanese culture. Through iconic installations of Tatsuo Miyajima and Louise Bourgeois at Roppongi Hills, and other public art in Naoshima and Inujima, the gallery supports artists’ commitments to public spaces, changing Japanese landscapes irrevocably, and generating new audiences.

SCAI The Bathhouse seeks to function as a meeting place of various currents of contemporary art, both in Japan and abroad, and to play a leading and responsible role in the art scene. Over the decades, SCAI has produced many exceptional artists, gallerists and art directors alike. In this same ethos, the gallery continues to realize visionary initiatives, and recently opened "Komagome Soko", an experimental project space for emerging talents and "SCAI PARK" which extends preservation and depot space to an exhibition site.