Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo plans Hans Haacke's first major retrospective in Asia, "Information Flow"

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo will present "Hans Haacke: Information Flow", which the museum describes as the first major retrospective in Asia devoted to the German-born artist. The exhibition runs from February 6 to May 16, 2027, in the museum's third-floor exhibition gallery, and covers more than six decades of work.

Haacke, born in Cologne in 1936 and based in New York, was a central figure in the development of Conceptual art there in the 1960s. According to the museum, he brought environmental processes, political power, economic interests and cultural institutions into the field of art and made visible the ways in which they interact, an approach that established him as a founding figure of institutional critique. By showing processes rather than finished forms, inviting audience participation and working with living organisms, plants, natural phenomena and images circulating in society, he widened the scope of artistic practice.

The exhibition begins with photographs Haacke took at documenta 2 in 1959, when, as a student at the State Art Academy in Kassel, he worked there as a guard and art handler. The pictures record not only the artworks but also visitors, staff and the installation process. From there the show proceeds broadly chronologically, from early works on physical and natural phenomena, such as "Condensation Cube" (1963–65), "Blue Sail" (1964–65) and "Grass Grows" (1967–69), to later installations that examine capitalist systems through real estate, industry and political power.

Also on view is documentation of "DER BEVÖLKERUNG", the participatory work Haacke installed at the German Bundestag in 2000: a largely untended garden that keeps changing as members of parliament bring soil from their constituencies. A new Tokyo edition of his "Visitors' Poll" series will gather responses from museum visitors as a form of social research.

The museum notes that, although Haacke took part in the 1970 Tokyo Biennale, where his work appeared in the exhibition "Between Man and Matter", his work has been shown in Japan only a handful of times since, and it presents the retrospective as the first comprehensive overview of his practice in the country.

Haacke moved to the United States in 1961 and taught at Cooper Union in New York from 1962 to 2002. His installation "Germania" at the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale received the Golden Lion, and he has had major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Centre Pompidou and the New Museum.