Image: Yoko Matsumoto painting in her studio, Ongata, Hachioji, Tokyo, in 1982. © The artist. Courtesy Hino Gallery and White Cube. Photo: © Mikio Kubota
Mudam Luxembourg will open ‘Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945’ in September 2026, bringing together more than 120 works by 39 women artists from Japan. The exhibition, on view from 25 September 2026 to 14 February 2027, is organised by Mudam in collaboration with Lenbachhaus Munich and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
The exhibition is presented as the first European survey to examine the role of women artists from Japan in the global postwar era and the decades that followed. It focuses on a period of major social change, tracing artistic developments in Japan and within the country’s transnational communities across Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.
According to Mudam, many of the works have rarely, if ever, been shown outside Japan. The presentation is structured across five thematic chapters, drawing on the artists’ personal lives, creative resilience and transnational activism. It will consider cultural exchanges and what the museum describes as the “forgotten margins of modernism,” while re-examining art histories from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Artists included in the exhibition are Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Fujiko Nakaya, Tomie Ohtake, Taeko Tomiyama and Yoshiko Shimada, among others. The selection will explore practices associated with a range of postwar art movements, from Gutai to experiments in video art, and will address contributions that have often been overlooked in broader accounts of global postwar art.
The exhibition is curated by Florence Ostende, assisted by Anaël Daoud and Yurika Imaseki. Its emphasis on transnational artistic exchange places the works within a wider network of artistic activity that extended beyond Japan, while retaining attention to the individual circumstances and working methods of the artists represented.
‘Kaihō’ will open at Mudam Luxembourg on Thursday, 24 September 2026, at 18:00, before opening to the public the following day. Mudam, whose full name is Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, is identified on its website as the contemporary art museum of Luxembourg. The exhibition will remain on view at the museum through 14 February 2027.
