Image: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo will mount a major retrospective of the Japanese painter Gyoshu Hayami from 19 March to 9 May 2027, presenting around 100 works drawn from museums and private collections across Japan. Titled '速水御舟展（仮称）' on the museum’s Japanese-language page and listed in English as 'Gyoshu Hayami Exhibition (tentative title),' the exhibition is scheduled for the museum’s first-floor special exhibition gallery.
Hayami, who lived from 1894 to 1935, is described by MOMAT as an artist active during the Taisho and early Showa periods whose meticulous detail and avant-garde compositions helped renew Japanese painting. The museum’s notice says his work could render, for example, the weave of tatami mats with painstaking precision, while also pushing toward bold and experimental structures. The retrospective is being organized in collaboration with The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, The Yomiuri Shimbun, and The Nikkei.
The exhibition has been in preparation through the museum’s research on Hayami’s archival materials, which it says it has been receiving, classifying, and studying for about five years. Those materials include diaries, letters, and references to art and anatomy from East and West. MOMAT says some items, including portions of the diaries and letters, have already been transcribed and made public, and that the archive has been essential to understanding Hayami’s practice.
According to the museum, the show will be the first Gyoshu Hayami retrospective in MOMAT’s more than 70-year history. The institution adds that it will also be the first such exhibition held by the National Museums of Modern Art system since 1980, when a Gyoshu Hayami exhibition took place at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, making this the first in 47 years.
The exhibition’s checklist will center on works held by the Tokyo and Kyoto national museums of modern art, supplemented by loans from museums and collectors throughout Japan. MOMAT says the selection will bring together works “indispensable” to understanding Hayami, and that the exhibition will read them anew alongside a variety of documents. The museum has not yet given a final title for the presentation.
The exhibition will run on weekdays, weekends and holiday periods at the museum’s Tokyo site, with Monday closures. Opening hours are listed as 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and until 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, with last entry 30 minutes before closing.
