Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo has closed ‘MOT Collection: First, Art’, an exhibition that used different meanings of “first” as an entry point into contemporary art. The presentation ran from 28 April to 16 August 2026 in the museum’s Collection Exhibition Rooms in Tokyo, according to the institution’s exhibition page and closing-day announcement.
Organised around questions including how to begin with things close at hand, what it means to see something for the first time and where an artwork comes into being, the exhibition was designed to offer ways into the museum’s collection for visitors encountering contemporary art for the first time. The museum also presented the show as an opportunity for returning visitors to reconsider familiar works and approaches.
The exhibition drew from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s collection of approximately 6,100 works, centred on postwar art. The museum rotates works in its collection exhibitions around three times a year, using changing groupings to introduce the holdings from different perspectives. ‘First, Art’ included newly acquired works and works shown in the collection exhibition for the first time.
Artists whose works were included featured Makoto Ito, Ryohei Usui, Kenjiro Okazaki, Keijiro Sato, Masao Shirakawa, Yukiko Suto, Aiko Tezuka, Yoko Terauchi, Tomoko Nagai and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, among others. The presentation also included works by Takashi Ishida, Oscar Oiwa, Teppei Kaneyasu, Masato Kobayashi, Kazuhiro Nomura, Ryota Yagi, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Gabriel Orozco and Tom Wesselmann.
Works highlighted on the museum’s page included Ryohei Usui’s ‘Fence’ (2024/2026), Tomoko Nagai’s ‘Blowing Flowers, Yellow and Ochre with a White Recorder’ (2007), Makoto Ito’s ‘BOAT:K-13’ (2013), Takashi Ishida’s ‘Umisaka no Emaki’ (2007), Masao Shirakawa’s ‘Tomoko & Light’ (2014), and Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s ‘G/Z Geshi: Bridge on the Summer Solstice IV’ (1993). Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Girl with Hair Ribbon’ was also identified as one of the museum’s representative collection works included in the display.
The exhibition was presented by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture. Admission was listed at ¥500 for general visitors, ¥400 for university and vocational-school students, and ¥250 for high-school students and visitors aged 65 or over; visitors up to junior-high-school age were admitted free. The museum’s regular opening hours were 10am to 6pm, with entry to the galleries ending 30 minutes before closing.
