AWT

BAR

The pop-up AWT Bar provides the city’s art community with a convivial gathering place and multisensory art experience during the four days of Art Week Tokyo. The platform entails three commissions: an emerging architect designs the bar space, a rising chef produces new edible creations, and selected artists conceive cocktails that reflect their artistic practices.

LANDSCAPE AS BAR

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City life is an assemblage of easy and convenient functions that we tend to take for granted. Yet, buried under all those functions, the landscape goes on quietly existing in urban space. Even here in Minami-Aoyama, in the heart of central Tokyo, the hilly terrain, the waterways flowing underground, the endless sky overhead, and the plants changing their appearance in response to the weather and seasons still make their presence felt. With this in mind, I have made an organic landscape out of the various “small natures” hiding in the city, the things we never see but which are always there around us.

A bar made out of a landscape has no standard tables or chairs, no level floors or ceilings, no vertical walls. Landforms of varying heights alternately become tables, chairs, small rooms, dishes, or scenery. The diverse scales of time and space that the landscape produces open up new ways of being in a bar. When we enter a landscape, we can enjoy the scenes around us while climbing hills, gathering nuts, picking flowers, collecting drops of water from leaves, or spreading out a blanket to lie down. Like plants and animals, which freely make their homes, find sustenance, and rest in nature, we too can make our own place, have a drink, and share conversations in the landscape as bar. 

Evoking the earth’s undulating surface, the rising and sloping organic forms generate spatial continuity and depth and become compositional elements of the scene. The hidden landscape of the city extends into architectural space to create new scenes and take on new relations with people. These in turn show us the possibilities of using and experiencing space as you would a landscape. 

Now made visible, this organic landscape becomes part of the city through its engagement with people and subtly connects back to the hidden landscape.

—Eiko Tomura

Flowers are nature’s art, giving expression to season and climate when they bloom. I grew up close to nature, and the scenes and memories of my childhood inspired me to attempt to capture the beauty and flavors of nature in my cooking. 

November is the season for burdock root and for apples. Graced with perilla blossom accents, the savory Burdock Root and Bacon Cake Salé marries the earthy fragrance of burdock root with the smokiness of homemade bacon. The Tatin Mont Blanc combines two seasonal sweets: a center of caramelized apples, baked for three hours to draw out the maximum flavor, ringed by chestnut cream molded into petal motifs. 

—Miya Enmeiji

EI ARAKAWA-NASH: AUTUMN GONE

Here is a persimmon-based brown cocktail with a botanical flavor, its name taken from a song by my favorite Japanese popstar. This is a good, strong cocktail for art lovers who are flying around the world. Have some before taking off. Yum!

Japanese persimmon liqueur, Nikka Coffey gin, Cointreau, Courvoisier, crème de cassis, dried persimmon garnish

MEIRO KOIZUMI: RITUALISTIC PEOPLE

The highly sociable human brain is said to have evolved in tandem with our linguistic faculty. As a result, human perception and behavior are easily influenced by language. I thought it might be possible to make a cocktail that reflects this primal cognitive mechanism and asked the hypnotist Masataka Urushihara, with whom I’ve collaborated on several projects in recent years, to help me develop my idea. With the guidance of the bartenders at Wall Aoyama, we eventually arrived at this cocktail through a process of trial and error. We hope it gives you a taste of just how strange our sense of taste can be.

Eyguebelle liqueur de cacao blanc, red ice ball, clove bitters, edible flower garnish

TABAIMO: THE MOST TERRIFYING WHITE

People tend to associate white with purity, innocence, morality. 
But even the slightest blemish is all it takes to taint pure white—to not just undermine the color’s symbolism but negate it completely. 
Impure. Not innocent. Immoral.
Of course there’s no such thing as pure white. It only looks that way. 
To me the most terrifying white is the one that manages to look pure. 
There’s always something lurking beneath the white surface. 
Or maybe I just want to taint that white myself. 

Cointreau, milk, cream, yogurt, Carib sugarcane liqueur, absinthe

LOCATION

emergence aoyama complex
5-4-30 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku

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DATES AND TIMES

November 7–10, 10am–10:30pm (last order 10pm)

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ADMISSION

Free