AWT
BUS
CATCH AN ART BUS
CATCH AN ART BUS
The free, hop-on, hop-off AWT Bus service makes navigating Tokyo’s art scene easier than ever before. The service links all of Art Week Tokyo’s venues and special platforms across multiple routes. Buses run every 15 minutes from 10am to 6pm and can be boarded at any stop. Just approach the Art Week Tokyo staff at your first point of embarkation to get started!
BERLIN–TOKYO
EXPRESS
BERLIN–TOKYO
EXPRESS
This year, in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the city partnership between Berlin and Tokyo, Art Week Tokyo is collaborating with visitBerlin to present “Berlin–Tokyo Express,” a series of site-specific works produced for the AWT Bus service. Artists Malte Bartsch, Lucia Kempkes, Andreas Mühe, Ayumi Paul, Santiago Sierra, and Danh Vo will transform select buses into moving micro exhibitions, while Mai Ueda will extend the project to the AWT Bar.
Curated by Lutz Henke, director of culture at visitBerlin, “Berlin–Tokyo Express” celebrates the synergy between the vibrant artistic communities of Berlin and Tokyo and offers audiences an unexpected encounter with contemporary art in an unusual setting.
ROUTES
ROUTES
ROUTE A
A1 National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo → A2 Mizuma Art Gallery → A3 Waitingroom → A4 Talion Gallery → A5 Fig. | Misako & Rosen → A6 XYZ collective → A7 Kayokoyuki → A8 SCAI The Bathhouse
MALTE BARTSCH: TIME MACHINE
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ⓒ Edward Greiner -
Time Machine is an ongoing project that Malte Bartsch first realized in 2013. To date he has installed and networked 45 Time Machine™ devices at locations around the world, with each device mounted on a wall where it can be operated by visitors. Whenever someone pushes the small red button on the front of the device, the Time Machine™ issues a receipt indicating the duration of the activation in seconds along with the location, date, and time. Each receipt also bears a unique sequential number generated through the synchronization/networking of all the devices. Time Machine invites reflection on contemporary phenomena such as time loss, working hours, compensation, and connectivity. Additionally, the artist engages with the art-historical discourse on what constitutes a work of art, declaring the receipt itself to be an artwork that viewers can take with them.
Every Time Machine activation around the world is registered in a comprehensive online database: tm.maltebartsch.de.
About the Artist
Malte Bartsch is a Berlin-based sculptor and installation artist. Employing a minimalist approach and speculative realism in his practice, Bartsch interrogates the intersection of technological innovation and quotidian life. His works explore the temporal and spatial dynamics of contemporary existence, weaving narratives that challenge our perceptions of progress and transience. Through kinetic sculptures, interactive installations, and performative actions, Bartsch crafts poetic dialogues between the artificial and the organic, inviting viewers to reflect on the sociophysical ramifications of modernity and the ephemeral nature of human experience.
ROUTE B
B1 AWT Video (SMBC East Tower) → B2 National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo → B3 Taguchi Fine Art → B4 Mujin-to Production → B5 Kana Kawanishi Gallery → B6 Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo → B7 Hagiwara Projects → B8 Transfer Point (Nihonbashi Crossing) → B9 Artizon Museum | Tomio Koyama Gallery → B10 Gallery Koyanagi | Chanel Nexus Hall → B11 Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum → B12 Shiseido Gallery and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP → B13 Transfer Point (Nihonbashi Crossing)
SANTIAGO SIERRA: BERLIN RECORDED THROUGH SILOS 9 AND 16 | 85 TEETH OF WAR REFUGEES FROM YEMEN AND SYRIA
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Sound pieces are an important part of Santiago Sierra’s practice. For Berlin Recorded Through Silos 9 and 16 (2011), the artist embarked on a sound experiment in Berlin, intending to record “silence” and press it on a vinyl record. The recording locations were two empty grain silos in the middle of the city. Rather than silence, the concrete structures—originally conceived as a secret reserve for West Berlin—amplified the city’s soundscape in the recordings, fostering the imaginary of Berlin.
Sierra has also been photographing the teeth of workers and marginalized groups since 2008—a reflection on the primal gesture of showing one’s teeth as a connection between the animal kingdom and contemporary societies. The photographs are intended to be widely shown, including at public sites. For “Berlin–Tokyo Express,” Sierra is collaborating with fashion collective Les Six to present a selection of photographs from his latest teeth campaign, 85 Teeth of War Refugees from Yemen and Syria (2023), on apparel worn by staff working on AWT Bus Route B.
About the Artist
Santiago Sierra’s work stands among the last several decades of art history like a massive black monolith. Sierra uses established contemporary art forms to expose the violence and injustice of Western modernity. To him, the cool, distanced language of minimalism is particularly well-suited for engaging with abstract economic and institutional systems that push people into dehumanizing production and living conditions. Sierra is also known for negotiating with third parties to carry out actions in public spaces, highlighting the materialistic procedures and systemic violence of capitalism and its exploitation of labor.
Les Six is a fashion collective founded by Ryohei Kawanishi in 2017.
ROUTE C
C1 AWT Focus (Okura Museum of Art) → C2 PGI → C3 Take Ninagawa → C4 Kaikai Kiki Gallery → C5 Transfer Point (Tengenjibashi Crossing) → C6 MEM → C7 Tokyo Photographic Art Museum → C8 Poetic Scape → C9 Leesaya → C10 Kosaku Kanechika | Takuro Someya Contemporary Art → C11 Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum → C12 Transfer Point (Tengenjibashi Crossing) → C13 Misa Shin Gallery → C14 Pace
LUCIA KEMPKES: A STREAM OF THOUGHTS TO DETACH US FROM THE CURRENT
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A Stream of Thoughts to Detach Us from the Current #55, 2024. Chewing gum and Gore-Tex on bus plush, suction cups, 63 x 58 cm. -
Lucia Kempkes’s installation A Stream of Thoughts to Detach Us from the Current (2024) explores the transient nature of being in motion, which is underscored by our memories and expectations of places as we watch the landscape rushing by. The piece features paintings and sculptural objects made from stone paper, including replicas of car and bus decorations, such as adhesive car sunshades that display changing scenes of desirable destinations. Due to the material’s properties, the objects dissolve slowly when exposed to UVB light, evoking the fleeting nature of our possibilities while in motion. The paintings are the centerpieces of the installation. Made with chewing gum on bus plush, they represent childhood memories and thoughts that form while waiting for something to happen. Kempkes’s installation invites reflection on the past, present, and future while embracing the transient nature of experiences during travel.
About the Artist
Lucia Kempkes explores social, cultural, and personal connections to mobility and our experiences of landscapes as well as the materials and objects created to navigate them. Her immersive conceptual installations integrate drawing, sculpture, carpet weaving, and video to examine how our relationships with landscapes evolve online and offline. Kempkes studied biology and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and fine art at the Universität der Künste Berlin and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has been an artist-in-residence at institutions including the Seoul Museum of Art, Pioneer Works in New York, and Rote Fabrik in Zurich. She is a visiting professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
ROUTE D
D1 AWT Bar (emergence aoyama complex) → D2 Fergus McCaffrey | Prada Aoyama → D3 Watari-um → D4 Ken Nakahashi → D5 Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery → D6 Gallery 38 → D7 Nanzuka Underground → D8 Blum → D9 AWT Bar (emergence aoyama complex) → D10 National Art Center, Tokyo | nca|nichido contemporary art → D11 Mori Art Museum → D12 Snow Contemporary
AYUMI PAUL: FORMS OF BREATH
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Photo by Debora Mittelstaedt -
Ayumi Paul’s practice is grounded in an observational approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things. Her work Forms of Breath, commissioned by the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin in 2024, consists of 12 stools crafted from a single piece of precious pear wood accompanied by washi paper and 12 breathing exercises. Together these elements form a spatial installation, with visitors able to move the stools around to create ever-evolving forms and constellations. For “Berlin–Tokyo Express,” instructions for eight of the breathing exercises are quietly positioned in bus windows, reflecting the artist’s intent to extend the work beyond its original context. This work serves as a reminder of the beauty and complexity of life, both around and within us, of which we are an integral part simply by breathing in and out.
About the Artist
Ayumi Paul’s art practice centers on listening and nonlinear time. Trained as a classical violinist, Paul explores how sound shapes perception and human connection while integrating materials like paper, textiles, and sound recordings into her works. Her projects often create new vocabularies that blend scientific research with the body’s innate ways of sensing. Recent exhibitions include the National Gallery Singapore; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Gropius Bau, Berlin; and the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin. In 2021 she received a fellowship from Villa Massimo in Rome, and her ongoing work The Singing Project (2020–) is hosted by the Gropius Bau, where she was an artist-in-residence in 2022.
ROUTE E
E1 AWT Focus (Okura Museum of Art) → E2 Ota Fine Arts | Kotaro Nukaga | ShugoArts | Taka Ishii Gallery | Taro Nasu | Perrotin | Yutaka Kikutake Gallery |Yumiko Chiba Associates → E3 AWT Bar (emergence aoyama complex) → E4 Return to E2
DANH VO: UNTITLED
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Photo by Nick Ash -
Danh Vo is collaborating with the Kyoto-based florist Mitate for “Berlin–Tokyo Express.” Flowers are a longstanding theme in Vo’s work, perhaps because they embody colonialism’s strange power to appropriate and monopolize beauty. Early on, Vo made tiles and wallpaper printed with drawings of flowers by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. More recently he has taken photographs of flowers growing in his gardens at Güldendhof, outside Berlin, and darker images taken at a flower shop owned by a German-Vietnamese family in Berlin. Flowers past, flowers present, flowers foreign, flowers domestic: The histories of the movement, growth, and evolution of these plants are as complex and entwined as human culture itself. Linnaeus invented the binomial classification system, imposing his logic on plants around the world. Flowers might reflect power in terms of how they are named and where they travel. Yet flowers have a resistant strain and can also act as an aesthetic refuge from the world.
About the Artist
Expressing an openness to personal relationships and fortuitous encounters, Danh Vo’s projects emerge via objects and images that have accrued meaning in the world, whether through their former ownership, their proximity to certain events, or their currency as universal icons. His work becomes an expanding and diversifying series of experiments, questioning what happens if he brings one set of elements together, then another, and another. This approach is driven by a profound desire to sift through the historical layers that inform our present. Power, history, eroticism, personal biography, imperial dissolution, and globalist expansion are all in play. The Vo family escaped from Vietnam to Denmark in 1979, and the artist’s work embodies the shifting and precarious nature of contemporary life.
Mitate was established in Kyoto in 2013 by Hayato and Mica Nishiyama.
ROUTE F
F1 AWT Focus (Okura Museum of Art) → F2 AWT Video (SMBC East Tower)
ANDREAS MÜHE: BUNKER—REAL HISTORICAL SPACE
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Installation view, Kunsthaus Dahlem, 2024. ⓒ Gunter Lepkowski. -
Bunkers, as monumental concrete structures, shape Europe’s landscape from Germany to the French coast, often serving as eerie reminders of the Nazi “Fortress Europe.” These oversized, indestructible structures, found even in city centers, are rooted in a dark past, yet their pure utility and archaic form disconnect them from time and place. Paradoxically, they embody the flow of history, representing both attack and protection. While French coastal bunkers are now playgrounds, new bunkers continue to be built for wars elsewhere.
In Bunker—Real Historical Space (2024), photographer Andreas Mühe transforms these massive, hard bunkers into small, soft, toy-like objects. Created by Kösener Spielzeug Manufaktur, these “cuddly bunkers” fill exhibition spaces like a sea of miniature, harmless creatures. Mühe’s transformation reduces the weight and roughness of the bunker to something soft, touchable, and playful, while still evoking the latent tension of the form’s historical significance and its potential to become an army.
About the Artist
Andreas Mühe is a leading German artist based in Berlin. Known for addressing controversial historical themes, Mühe uses large-format analog photography to create meticulously staged compositions. His works explore Germany’s past, particularly the period after 1945 and the era of the former German Democratic Republic, reflecting on collective memory and historiography. Notable projects include Obersalzberg (2010–12), Wandlitz (2011), Mischpoche (2016–19), Biorobots I (2020), and Biorobots II (2021). Bunker—Real Historical Space (2024) is Mühe’s first sculptural installation, reflecting his belief that photography is “sculpture with light.”
Kösener Spielzeug Manufaktur is a traditional, family-owned company based in Saxony-Anhalt.
REST STOP: AWT BAR
MAI UEDA: TO SEE THE WIND
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Photo by Yuko Torihara -
Mai Ueda will present to see the wind (2004), a special tea ceremony, at the AWT Bar using teabowls made by fellow artist and frequent collaborator Rirkrit Tiravanija. Of the experience Ueda writes: “I will serve tea that makes participants feel that the process that has led them to this place has been akin to walking through a roji, a tea garden that allows one to leave ordinary life behind to join the time and space of the tearoom. Each sip of tea will feel like sitting in a session of zazen and hearing the bell ring. Each person can leave the tearoom with an experience that is slightly different from before they have arrived at this moment.”
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Times
Friday, November 8, 12 noon
Saturday, November 9, 11am
About the Artist
Mai Ueda cherishes art as life and life as art. Her message is to encourage people to feel for themselves. Since 2000 she has been working with diverse mediums, including the internet, performance, drawing, poetry, and installation, finding herself most comfortable with those that are immaterial. Starting in 2012 Ueda rediscovered her Japanese roots through Zen and the tradition of the tea ceremony, which she has made the core of her practice. A tea ceremony brings people together to share knowledge and emotions. It creates an awareness of enjoying the moment. She shares her tea practice in museums and institutions around the world.