TOKAS-Emerging 2026

TOP >
Exhibitions / Performances >
TOKAS-Emerging 2026

TOKAS-Emerging

Hongo

TOKAS-Emerging 2026

Related Event
Participating Creator

Six solo-exhibitions by emerging artists selected from 186 applications

“TOKAS-Emerging” is a program that Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) launched in 2001 with the aim to support young artists. Targeting Japanese resident artists aged 35 or younger, the program offers selected artists opportunities to hold their solo exhibition. For “TOKAS-Emerging 2026,” six artists were selected through screenings from a total of 186 applications from across Japan. Held in two separate periods between April and June 2026, these exhibitions of works by up-and-coming artists cover a wide range of formats, including paintings, prints, video art, installations, etc.

Information

Title	TOKAS-Emerging 2026
Period	Part 1: Apr 4 (Sat) – May 3 (Sun), 2026 Part 2: May 16 (Sat) – June 14 (Sun), 2026
Time	11:00–19:00 (Last Entry: 18:30)
Closed	Mondays
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku)
Admission	Free
Artists	Part 1: NISHIMURA Ryo, TERADA Kento, YANG Bo Part 2: KISHIMOTO Nozomu, OKIMI Karen, YUAN Shuohan
Organizer	Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

Part 1: Apr 4 (Sat) – May 3 (Sun), 2026

Measuring of eternity 1 2024
Photo: TAKANO Tomomi
Courtesy of Kyoto Seika University Gallery Terra-S

NISHIMURA Ryo
“Traveling through our life form / discarding my form / observing a landscape ”

Aiming to visualize things that we rarely pay attention to, such as the fluidity of nature, life processes, and the passage of time, Nishimura Ryo creates print works for which he carves images based on his observations into transparent plastic boards. The “lines” depicted here come with a sense of flow and energy, and the ink oozing out from the uneven surface seems to be charging each work with vital power. Inspired by Kon Junzo, an artist who has been contributing to modernology by continuously sending sketches of sceneries of Aomori to Tokyo, in this exhibition Nishimura projects life-sized images of mountain streams in Oirase.

okinawan silence – cracked departure 2025
© Kento Terada, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates

TERADA Kento
“A Pillow for the Fence, at Night in Okinawa”

Terada Kento creates works that project aspects of absence and silence, such as images of non-existent family members, and thereby highlight various underlying systems. Inspired by the artist’s own early memories of nightscapes in the Okinawan suburbs where he grew up, this installation is themed around remnants of war that still exist in Okinawa today. Posts of a fence that has been standing there since the war as a symbol for violence and separation, reappear in the form of soft pillows that invite visitors to lie down and take a nap on them, while reflecting on the state of “post war?” as questioned in a bright neon sign on a wall in the dim exhibition space.

Roulette#3 (R.I.P Lou reed) 2023

YANG Bo
“Number Five Roulette”

The works of Yang Bo are inspired by lyrics found in music and movies from past times and generations quite unrelated to the artist himself. For this work, Yang first made a painting, which he then used as a “script” for a movie that he subsequently shot. On a screen put up at the exhibition venue, Yang appears in three different roles: the guitarist that he always wanted to be, and two characters that appear in the lyrics of one particular song. The work is an attempt to present a movie as one possible framework for assimilating song lyrics from a different time and place regardless of such things as affinity or admiration, as expressed also in the paintings arranged around the screen in the center of the exhibition.

Part 2: May 16 (Sat) – June 14 (Sun), 2026

Setting a Ladder, a Circle is Forming 2024

KISHIMOTO Nozomu
“This Star, a Circle”

Kishimoto Nozomu mainly creates collage works for which he picks up traces of anonymous activity that he finds in the city, and juxtaposes fragments of those with drawings (traces) of his own. It is a creative process that resembles composing poems from scattered words, and to describe it, the artist borrows the image of a “ladder” that connects different spaces with each other. By putting up ladders between separate things such as himself and others in the city, or between the past and the present, Kishimoto aims to capture moments of both sides melting together, and thereby generate new sensations and narratives.

Support: THE ASAHI SHIMBUN FOUNDATION

surface of the earth (light) 2025

OKIMI Karen
“The eruption, its afterimage”

In her paintings, Okimi Karen explores the relationships between human perception and movement, such as the dazzling sensation the moment we open them, or the field of vision and other responses of the body that change as we move. For example, in a chain of transformations, the momentary sensual experience of light is captured in a movie, turned into a print, inverted, segmentalized, and translated into a color chart, before it eventually reappears in the form of a painting made with sulfur powder. Staged inside a white cube, this scheme of movement and perception emerges as a pure phenomenon with no personal memory or experience involved.

Until I Approached —What Lies 2025

YUAN Shuohan
“Until I Approached —What Lies”

Yuan Shuohan employs the visual language of video to examine the whereabouts of human identity that has become unsteady in a globalized world where people continue to move and migrate, and potentially become foreigners wherever they are. In order to project a sense of alienation that any viewer can share, and that inspires them identify themselves with the situations in the videos, Yuan combines elements of self-documentation with other people’s memories. In this exhibition, the artist explores people’s ideas of their original “homes” as places to return to while things around them keep changing, inspired by the question what kinds of places the “homes” are that people see in their dreams.

Related Event

Part 1: Artist Talk

Date	Apr 4, 2026 (Sat) 16:00-17:30
Artists	NISHIMURA Ryo, TERADA Kento, YANG Bo
Guest	MORI Keisuke (Curator, Chiba City Museum of Art)
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku)
Admission	Free
Language	Japanese

*Schedule and participants are subject to change.

Part 2: Artist Talk

Date	May 16, 2026 (Sat) 16:00-17:30
Artists	KISHIMOTO Nozomu, OKIMI Karen, YUAN Shuohan
Guest	FUKUMOTO Takashi (Curator, The National Museum of Art, Osaka)
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku)
Admission	Free
Language	Japanese