Tokyo Gendai Returns With a Fresh Focus on Works on Paper

Following Frieze Seoul and Kiaf, east Asia’s September fair circuit moves from Korea to Japan, where Tokyo Gendai today opens its fourth edition at Pacifico Yokohama to the public. It does so with a clear proposition: works on paper can offer both a route into collecting and a field for material experimentation.

This edition debuts Miki (“Trunk”), an 11-gallery section of the show devoted to works on paper—a medium that, in Japan, contemporary artists continue to test through drawing, photography, printmaking, layering and other hybrid approaches.

“Paper feels especially relevant because it is at an intersection between tradition and experimentation,” fair director Eri Takane told Ocula. “At a time when much of our visual experience is digital, paper occupies an interesting space in contemporary art, because of its physical, material qualities.”

The fair makes this contrast between the physical and the virtual explicit by presenting Miki alongside Tane (“Seed”), its digital-media sector, which returns after a two-year absence.

Miki is strongest where the material qualities of its works are clearest. New York City’s John Szoke Gallery, since 1974 a specialist in works on paper by Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch, brings Picasso’s Suite Vollard (1930–1937) and rare early versions printed before the plates were steel-faced, offering particularly rich impressions.

“Japanese audiences understand perhaps more naturally than many others that a work on paper is not simply a secondary image or a reproduction,” the gallery’s eponymous founder said in a recent interview, citing the country’s woodblock tradition and close attention to paper, ink and variations between impressions.

At Hsinchu’s UP Gallery, Taipei-based artist Mia Liu turns printed images into three-dimensional objects. Working across drawing, paper installation and photography, Liu’s 2022 pieces Blue and White Tarp and Desolation and Rebirth project from the wall and change as the viewer moves. Shown alongside works by Arthur Ou, Mona Kuhn and Cristina de Middel, Liu’s sculptures position photography as a spatial and material practice.

A collaboration between Tokyo Gendai and Photofairs Shanghai brings four first-time exhibitors from China and Hong Kong into Miki: Art on Space (Foshan), Boogie Woogie Photography (Hong Kong), Hart Gallery (Hangzhou) and X Contemporary Art (Changsha). Their presentations focus on contemporary photography.

Published price bands across Miki range from less than $10,000 for works by Miti Ruangkritya at Bangkok CityCity Gallery to more than $250,000 for Picasso’s Femme et l’enfant (1922) at John Szoke Gallery. That spread matters in a market where 93 per cent of transactions were below $50,000 in 2024.

The percentage of sales at art fairs for Japanese dealers also rose from 10 to 19 percent that year, with the majority of sales made at fairs in Japan, according to a report commissioned by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs. Takane described the region’s season thus far as “busy and “vibrant”, with “a real appetite for quality and for discovering artists and practices from across Asia, alongside continued interest in established international names”.

Tokyo Gendai’s vernissage takes place on 10 September. The fair opens to the public from 11–13 September.