Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo will present ‘MOT Collection: いつかの光を今みている’ from 19 September 2026 to 6 January 2027 in its Collection Galleries. The museum has announced the exhibition details on its website and social media, describing the show as a new presentation of works from its holdings, shaped around the themes of ‘light’ and ‘time’ and incorporating newly acquired works.
MOT says the collection series changes with each season to introduce its approximately 6,100 postwar and contemporary works from different angles. For this iteration, the museum is organizing the display around the idea that the present is layered with traces of the past. The exhibition text points to many forms of light—starlight that began its journey long ago, shifting sunlight, moonlight, electric light, and the brief glow of fireflies—as a way of considering how looking at light can also evoke memories of other times and places.
The show will feature works by artists including Mami Kosemura, Kimio Tsuchiya, Arisa Kumagai, and Shigeo Toya, alongside pieces by Kusama Yayoi, Yu-Gi Oh, Tadanori Yokoo, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yoko Matsumoto, and others. The museum also names Yoshiharu Tsuchiya, Naoko Sekine, Koichi Tateishi, Hiroshi Nakamura, Hideko Fukushima, Hikaru Fujii, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Hiroshi Yoshida, Yutaka Yoshimota, Dan Flavin, and Agnes Martin among the participants. The presentation is framed less as a chronological survey than as a thematic reading of the collection through visual and temporal resonance.
Several works will be shown publicly for the first time since entering the collection. According to the museum, these include Kosemura’s video installation, Tsuchiya’s sculptural work, Kumagai’s painting, and Fujii’s video piece. The exhibition materials also note that Fujii’s work captures the museum’s galleries in the dim, uncertain light of the COVID-19 period, giving the collection display a direct link to recent conditions of looking and memory.
Among the highlights, MOT points to Yoshida Hiroshi’s woodblock prints on Tokyo, made about 100 years ago, as well as Kusama’s sculptural work, Shinohara Ushio’s and Yokoo’s vivid paintings, and Matsumoto’s drawings. The museum is also showing ‘森の象の窯の死’ by Toya, who died in April this year. The exhibition therefore combines historic works, recent acquisitions, and key collection pieces in a single installation built around a shared examination of light as subject, medium, and metaphor.
The exhibition will run in the museum’s Collection Galleries at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, in Koto, Tokyo. Opening hours are 10:00 to 18:00, with late opening until 20:00 on Fridays in November. Admission is 500 yen for adults, 400 yen for university and vocational school students, 250 yen for high school students and visitors aged 65 and over, and free for junior high school students and younger. The museum lists Monday closures, with exceptions on 21 September, 12 October, and 23 November, and a year-end closure from 28 December to 1 January.
