April 25–September 6, 2026
The Noto Earthquake of 2024 killed over 700 people and destroyed countless buildings in the Japanese prefecture of Ishikawa. During the earthquake, all of the iconic frosted glass ceilings of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, 130 kilometers from the epicenter, collapsed. Because it was New Year’s Day, no one at the museum was hurt, but this event prompted the institution to initiate a critical process of reflection on its relationship to the public. While all museums must constantly think about and work on these relations, this is a particularly relevant and charged process here, at this museum, and now, in Japan.
Opened in 2004 and designed by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) as a “museum open to the city like a park,” its architecture inaugurated a new paradigm of institutional transparency. Its perfectly circular, glazed form is counterposed by a rectilinear plan of galleries and courtyards. Situated in the center of a small park built at the same time and across from Kanazawa City Hall, many of the wide corridor-like spaces between these internal volumes, as well as the pulsating arcade-like space along the facade, are accessible to the general public, and do not need a ticket to use. The museum occasionally creates programs in this “leftover” space which is anyway frequented by pedestrians passing through, teenagers hanging out, and people simply curious to gain a different perspective on their surroundings.
Curated by Jin Motohashi, “ROJŌ” features seventeen works from an electrifying range of creative practices, extending the museum’s reflections into a wider consideration of the postwar evolution of public space in Japan. Its critical problematization of public space (“rojo” loosely translates to “the street”) comes at a moment when anti-migrant nationalist politics are not just on the rise but have been legitimized through national elections, and are increasingly materializing in public space through acts of violence and discrimination. Within this context, the exhibition turns away from divisionary rhetoric to instead focus on what is shared, with a twofold claim: we all share the city, but it is so vast and complex and busy that this fact can be easy to ignore.
Key contributions to the exhibition demonstrate what Anna Tsing calls the “art of noticing,” in which practices of observation cultivate an ethics of care, here oriented towards the built environment as a shared social and cultural space. Most emblematic of this is the gallery dedicated to the work of ROJO Society (Street Observation Society), a group of artists, writers, and architects who first came together forty years ago to observe, document, and appreciate the oddities—the readymades or, in ROJO member Genpei Akasegawa’s term, the “Hyperart”—of Japanese cities, such as manhole covers and exhaust pipes. The spirit of ROJO and its careful practice of noticing is carried forward by another work in the show by the manga artist panpanya, whose graphic novels feature meticulous representations of quotidian urban details.
The exhibition also draws attention to what is at risk of disappearing and being forgotten in the continuous evolution of our cities, a process that can be brought about by a multitude of forces—only some of them literally seismic. One of the most potent representations of this was a pair of photographs of Shinjuku West Exit Plaza, a vast underground parking structure that is currently being redeveloped. In one 1969 photograph by Shuji Yamada, the structure is completely filled with bodies, occupied as part of the anti–Vietnam War “folk guerilla” protest movement. Shortly thereafter, public spaces such as these were reclassified as spaces of transit in order to prevent gathering. Another photograph, taken by Naoko Sakokawa in 1996, captures an unemployed man living in a cardboard shelter within the same structure during the fallout of the economic crisis of the nineties. Hostile architecture was soon installed to prevent people from dwelling in the space, and in 1998 the “village” in Shinjuku West Exit Plaza was destroyed in a suspicious fire.
Walking around cities in Japan today, it is rare to see such visible signs or scenes of protest (though the recent series of demonstrations against Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s agenda of re-militarization are noteworthy). While this is very much by design (the classification of public space as a space of transit is still in force today), there are other cultures of public space that have been slowly disappearing with less explicit intention. One of these is street performance, a common postwar urban practice of public expression and spatial negotiation. This rich history is brought to light in the exhibition with a series of photographs, videos, and artifacts documenting the work of Gilyak Amagasaki, a ninety-five-year-old performer who for decades has danced in public spaces around Japan. Amagasaki inaugurates each of his performances—which have taken place everywhere from sidewalks and the middle of busy roads to sites of devastation—by drawing a circle on the ground. Beyond serving as a stage, these circles, and the dances performed within them, act as a declaration, a claim to public space.
A final set of works seeks to reflect directly on how museums actively question and mediate relations between private and public within the city. Asako Tokitsu’s exploded wall drawing operates on both sides of the transparent boundary between ticketed and unticketed areas within one part of the museum, and through the formal suggestion of forced perspective questions from where one is expected to see the work. Ayako Murata’s long-term ROJŌ ENGEI (2010–present) highlights the networks of more-than-human relations cultivated by street gardeners on their eaves and in their alleyways, while here also giving visitors containers and seeds to create new relationships with the city via plants. And Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group’s 道 Street (2017–18) documents the art collective’s project for the 2017 Asian Art Biennale, in which they sought to officially designate a strip of asphalt connecting the inside of the museum to the street as public space and make it accessible 24/7.
“ROJŌ” is a refreshing and urgent take on the eternal question of what it means—and takes—to live together in the city and become part of a larger body politic. Indeed, cities are always changing, as are the ways people inhabit them, and the relationship between the two is a constant negotiation. Art (here very widely conceived to include design, infrastructure, media, and pop culture) is a vital means of intervening within the struggle over the terms of that debate. With a stimulating mix of creative approaches, this exhibition is a welcome and contextual contribution to the nebulous field of critical spatial practice. By casting light on how public space has evolved over time, the exhibition provides space to reflect on what to hold onto, what is worth caring for, as we continue to fight for the right to the city.
