Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo will present ‘Constellation—Stars That Shared Time: Transborder Artistic Perspectives’, an exhibition examining modern Taiwanese art and its connections with Japan through painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, literature, film, music, theatre and dance. The exhibition will run from September 5 through December 13, 2026, in the museum’s first- and third-floor special exhibition galleries.
The project takes as its starting point ‘Le Moulin’ (2015), the film by Taiwanese director and curator HUANG Ya-li about the Fengche Poetry Society, a modernist poetry group formed in Taiwan in the 1930s. The group’s members experimented with surrealism and wrote poetry in Japanese during the period of Japanese rule. The film received the Best Documentary award at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, and its fragmented, non-linear approach provides the conceptual basis for the exhibition’s presentation.
HUANG Ya-li will serve as guest curator, extending the film’s methods of reflection and editing into the gallery. Rather than presenting a single, fixed historical narrative, the exhibition will arrange artworks and materials in montage-like sequences across six chapters. Videos directed by HUANG, reflective surfaces and a circulation route designed to encourage disorientation will form part of the installation, positioning the visitor’s body and viewpoint within the network of relationships created by the display.
The exhibition will bring together approximately 200 modern Taiwanese artworks and around 500 documents, alongside roughly 100 works from Japan. More than 15 museums and collections in Taiwan are contributing loans, including the Tainan Art Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and National Taiwan Library. The participating artists include HUANG Tu-Shui, CHEN Cheng-po, LI Mei-shu, HO Te-lai, LIN Yu-shan, KUO Hsueh-hu, HONG Rui-lin, HUANG Tsao-tsao, CHEN Hsiayu and CHUANG Shih-ho.
Among the works identified by the museum are CHEN Cheng-po’s ‘A Scene in Chiayi Park’ (1934) and ‘Nude with Green Mask’ (circa 1929–33), FUJISHIMA Takeji’s ‘Landscape of Tainan’ (1933), YANG San-lang’s ‘Parisienne’ (1932) and TOGO Seiji’s ‘Surrealist Stroll’ (1929). The documents include books and magazines published in Taiwan and Japan, correspondence between artists, personal notes and albums, as well as material relating to literature, music, the record industry, dance, theatre and crafts. Materials connected with Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples will also be displayed in relation to the broader group of works and archival sources.
The spatial design is by UxU Studio, founded in 2013 by Taiwan-based architects CHEN Kuan-Hung and CHEN Ying-Chu. The museum describes the design as a structure for generating multiple relationships, using reflective materials to make the exhibition environment itself part of the installation. HUANG’s curatorial practice crosses film and exhibition-making, and includes the 2019 exhibition ‘Constellation: The Fengche Poetry Society and the Era of Transboundary Art’ at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
‘Constellation—Stars That Shared Time’ is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Bonny Artworks Co., Ltd., with special cooperation from Taiwanese museums and cultural institutions. The museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; on Fridays in November, it will remain open until 8 p.m. The exhibition will be closed on Mondays, except September 21, October 12 and November 23, and on September 24, October 13 and November 24, 2026.
