Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum will open a special exhibition, 'This Place's Scenery - Ueno, Omuta, Buenos Aires', from July 23 to October 7, 2026, as part of its 100th anniversary celebrations. The museum, which opened in 1926 as Japan’s first public art museum, is using the centennial to look back on a century of artistic activity through the idea of place, drawing connections between three locations in Japan and abroad: Ueno, Omuta and Buenos Aires.
The exhibition is organized into three sections that approach those locations from different angles. The first, centered on Ueno, traces the museum’s own history through exhibitions, surrounding landscapes and visual records made across different eras. According to the source material, the section uses paintings, prints and photographs to survey the museum’s beginnings, wartime and postwar conditions, and the activities that followed the opening of the new building in 1975, alongside changing views of the Ueno area.
The second section focuses on the painter Shigeo Egami, who spent his life in Omuta and Arao in Kyushu’s coal-mining region. The exhibition follows his practice through roughly 400 works, including woodblock prints and abstract paintings shown in Tokyo for the first time, according to the source. Egami continued to work from direct observation of the landscapes around him, using accessible materials such as pencils, watercolors and crayons. The exhibition presents his career as a sustained engagement with the everyday environment close at hand.
The third section is a research project by AHA! built around 'The Garden of Zinnias', the first work acquired by Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Starting from the painting’s previously unclear authorship, the project led to the discovery of Tetsutaro Fujioka (1901-1982), who traveled from Japan to Buenos Aires in 1927 and worked in landscaping and floriculture. The exhibition brings that research into view through archival materials and related photographs, and it also includes a 2027 daily calendar made with public submissions of flower photographs.
Related programs will run during the exhibition period, including talk series featuring Keita Egami, Shigeo Egami’s younger son, and Atsushi Matsumoto of AHA!, as well as participatory viewing programs with art communicators. The museum also plans free admission days for visitors aged 18 and under and their accompanying guardians.
The exhibition will be shown in Galleries A, B and C at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Opening hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with late opening on Fridays until 8:00 p.m.; last entry is 30 minutes before closing. The museum will close on Mondays, except August 10 and September 21, when it will remain open. Admission is priced at 1,200 yen for adults, 1,000 yen for visitors aged 65 and older, and free for students and those 18 and under.
