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People often refer to Tennoz as an “art city,” but in reality, it doesn’t quite match the typical museum district. The area’s roots are in logistics—warehouses, storage, organizing things. When Warehouse TERRADA shifted from simply storing art in the 1970s to pursuing a broader cultural vision, they didn’t abandon that warehouse mentality. Instead, they built upon it. Now, the neighborhood features galleries, a museum, a pigment lab, even a cafe where you can purchase art, along with a waterside path that encourages you to explore the entire area rather than just stopping at one destination.

CLAIRE FUJITA "Uncontrollable" 2024-2025 Photos by Matteo Belfiore

Here, the TERRADA ART AWARD isn’t simply another prize—it truly brings Tennoz to life. You notice it immediately at the finalist exhibition: five solo shows arranged in a former warehouse, each displaying new work developed from the artists’ initial concepts. Everything flows in a cycle—artists are selected, create their pieces, exhibit them, and then those works send waves through the Tennoz community. The main aim of the award is to support emerging artists with global potential, and honestly, that matches perfectly with Tennoz’s role as a link between Japan and the international art scene.

What stayed with me from TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 Finalist Exhibition wasn’t a unified style—it was this collective fascination with systems. Everyone seemed to probe into how meaning is constructed: through science, through history, the city itself, the body, and our relationship with nature. Sure, the stated themes are pretty broad, but as you move from one artist’s work to another, the show feels more cohesive. Each of the five artists offers their own distinct perspective.

A warehouse is never just an empty shell. It’s always about regulation—regulating the environment, access, security. That’s why TERRADA’s cultural initiative is so intriguing. They’ve transformed that sense of control into something more like an open invitation. In Tennoz, the precisely managed environment encourages you: step inside, really observe, focus, and then move on. The whole district functions on dense scheduling, one event flowing seamlessly into the next.

CLAIRE FUJITA "Reaction ~ver. Dionaea muscipula~" 2025

CLAIRE FUJITA "Reaction ~ver. Dionaea muscipula~" 2025

CLAIRE FUJITA "Auto-Pollination" 2025

CLAIRE Fujita "Reation ~ver. Dionaea muscipula~" 2025

Claire Fujita: listening to what does not speakMy strongest response was to Claire Fujita. Her position starts from a simple but radical proposition: that attention is a political resource, and that our current culture misallocates it toward speed and utility. Her text on the finalist page is unusually clear in how it frames the stakes of perception, and I want to keep one sentence close because it captures the exhibition’s underlying tension: “Plants remind us quietly of another way of being. They do not speak, yet they respond sensitively to changes in light, temperature, and wind, continuously interacting with their surroundings.”This is where my mind went to Stefano Mancuso—not as an art reference, but as a cultural one. Mancuso’s writing and research has popularized the idea that plants communicate and respond in ways we rarely register because we are trained to recognize communication only when it resembles human speech. Fujita’s work, at its best, makes that mismatch visible: nature “speaks” in signals that are present, legible, and continuous, but culturally discounted. It is not nature that is silent; it is our perceptual training that is selective.In a broader sense, this is a critique of contemporary life in Tokyo as well: a city of hyper-efficiency that often treats slow responsiveness as non-productive. Fujita’s work asks whether we can re-enter a slower ethics of relation—between bodies, between humans, between humans and non-human systems—without turning that ethics into a marketable aesthetic.

Sakura Koretsune: the artist as reporter, the artwork as archive

SAKURA KORETSUNE "Fictional Toys" 2015-2025

SAKURA KORETSUNE "Fictional Toys" 2015-2025

SAKURA KORETSUNE "Fictional Toys" 2015-2025

SAKURA KORETSUNE "Fictional Toys" 2015-2025

Sakura Koretsune’s work lands differently. She approaches art as a way of doing history. You can sense this reporter-like approach in how she works—traveling, talking to people, gathering things—but she doesn’t act like a neutral journalist. On the finalist page, Koretsune mentions using old whaling materials and openly questions how stories and skills get passed down when the original tools and materials are gone.What sticks with me is that her work isn’t just an abstract idea hidden away in a studio. She builds it from real interactions with people and the lingering remains of what’s vanished. She doesn’t avoid the complicated side of inheritance—how do you hold onto something that society has left behind? Koretsune’s way is to make “fictional toys,” playful objects that carry stories and techniques, not through official means, but through the act of playing.In Tennoz, this takes on a different angle. The area is all about storage and preservation, but Koretsune isn’t just piling up artifacts. She’s preserving connections—skills, stories, those cultural leftovers you can’t seal in a climate-controlled vault. Her work is a reminder: archiving isn’t only about saving old objects, it’s about keeping the channels open so people can continue learning and passing things forward.

Yuske Taninaka: reclaiming the body from productivity

YUSKE TANINAKA "Healing for Unsanctioned Timelines (Diagram Project)" 2025-

YUSKE TANINAKA "Healing for Unsanctioned Timelines (Diagram Project)" 2025-

YUSKE TANINAKA exhibition view

YUSKE TANINAKA "Vagus Practice" 2025-

Yuske Taninaka articulates a tension that feels increasingly urgent: the tendency to understand the body only through “scientific verifiability” or “economic productivity,” and the desire to remain excited by the body’s potential beyond those frameworks.This is not a rejection of science, nor a romantic return to “authentic” embodiment. It is closer to a political question: who gets to define what a body is for? Taninaka points toward care, healing, and community not as soft alternatives, but as sites where agency can be reassembled—where the body is not merely repaired so it can return to work, but re-situated in relation to others.In the context of an award exhibition, this matters because awards and exhibitions are themselves productivity machines: they generate visibility, career momentum, institutional validation. Taninaka’s stance complicates that logic, asking whether the body can appear in the gallery without being converted into spectacle or proof.

Daisuke Kuroda: the city’s ghosts, empathy and repulsion

DAISUKE KURODA "Sculptor's Table" 2025-

DAISUKE KURODA "Sculptor's Table" 2025-

DAISUKE KURODA "Sculptor's Table" 2025-

DAISUKE KURODA "Sculptor's Table" 2025-

Daisuke Kuroda’s statement is one of the most direct: he focuses on “ghostly presences lingering in the city—forgotten or ignored—and depicts their forms through empathy and repulsion.” This dual affect is important. Tokyo often aestheticizes absence: ruins become Instagram backdrops, marginal spaces become “edgy” scenery. Kuroda’s framing resists that comfort. The “ghosts” are not decorative; they are ethical problems.Kuroda’s recent research into sculpture—using sculptors and their processes as motifs—adds another layer: the work is not only about what the city forgets, but about how art history itself is constructed, narrated, and canonized. In other words, the ghosts are also inside the discipline.In a warehouse exhibition space, where contemporary art can sometimes feel frictionless, Kuroda’s insistence on repulsion is a useful interruption. It suggests that empathy is not enough; it must be tested against what we would rather not see.

Yuki Kobayashi: self-defense, lineage, and the contemporary body

YUKI KOBAYASHI "The Wing Chun Project" 2019-

YUKI KOBAYASHI "The Wing Chun Project" 2019-

YUKI KOBAYASHI "The Wing Chun Project" 2019-

YUKI KOBAYASHI "The Wing Chun Project" 2019-

Yuki Kobayashi’s “Wing Chun Project” opens a set of questions that, in Japan, can feel difficult to discuss directly: the relationship between self-defense, historical memory, and colonial/war legacies in East Asia. Kobayashi traces Wing Chun’s lineage, its transmission through conflict and migration, and asks what it means to learn combat today.There is a risk, in contemporary art contexts, that martial practices become exoticized—reduced to choreographic aesthetics or “discipline” as lifestyle branding. Kobayashi’s framing avoids that by returning to history: the body is not a neutral instrument; it is shaped by power, and training is never only personal.The finalist page notes scheduled performances and open training during the exhibition period, which reinforces the project’s nature as practice rather than object. In Tennoz—where so much is designed to be consumed smoothly—this insistence on practice introduces another tempo: repetition, learning, fatigue, and the sociality of training.

The parallel program: WHAT CAFE and the market layer

Photo by TERRADA

TERRADA made a smart decision by linking TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 Finalist Exhibition with the WHAT CAFE program. At the same time, WHAT CAFE is presenting works from award-winning and selected artists from TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 —fifteen in total. You’ll find older pieces displayed right next to new ones, along with short reflections from the artists about where they are now.

They scheduled everything deliberately. WHAT CAFE runs from January 10 to 25, 2026, while the finalist exhibition takes place from January 16 to February 1. That overlap is intentional. It turns Tennoz into a route you can follow—begin with the latest projects from this year’s finalists, then move through the past decade to see what previous winners have accomplished since their awards.

Photo by TERRADA

The atmosphere is different, too. WHAT CAFE isn’t simply a gallery; it’s a space where art is exhibited and available for purchase, with a regular rotation of shows and a clear emphasis on the market. When you combine that with the award, it serves as a reality check. Being recognized is one thing. Being able to endure and build a lasting career? That’s the real challenge.

NAKED meets Gaudí: spectacle next door

Right now, Tennoz is alive with excitement for a major event: “NAKED meets Gaudí,” taking over Warehouse TERRADA (G1) Building from January 10 to March 15, 2026. The whole area is getting involved. There’s a Park Güell model at WHAT MUSEUM, special offers for ticket holders, and even exclusive menus at WHAT CAFE.

This is Tennoz at its most dynamic. They use a headline-worthy immersive show to draw crowds, and let that buzz spill out into the neighborhood. More visitors linger, more money circulates through local businesses, and culture is woven right into the economy. It’s clever and it does change the atmosphere.Here, you get two experiences at once. The Gaudí event is designed to be straightforward, fun, and easy to share—something anyone can jump into. The finalist exhibition next door is the opposite. It invites you to slow down, look closely, notice subtle details, and reflect. Putting both side by side creates a kind of experiment. Do people carry the same attention from one to the other? Or does the thrill of spectacle leave something behind?

Maybe that’s the real theme of this season in Tennoz: attention. There’s only so much to go around, and different types of culture compete for your focus—on one side, the comfort of immersive experiences; on the other, art that demands more from you.

The real strength of the TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 is that it refuses to represent Tokyo’s contemporary art scene with just one approach. Instead, it presents five bold ideas about living with complexity. These works don’t just touch on big themes—they grapple with the systems that shape what we notice, and what gets overlooked: science, history, cities, money, the body. And that’s Tennoz’s peculiar appeal. A place built for control—warehouses, managed spaces, logistics—becomes a setting for questioning control itself.

In a season full of events and drawn toward spectacle, the finalist exhibition quietly makes its point: don’t forget how to pay attention to things that aren’t immediately easy to take in. Stick with what challenges you. That’s where things get interesting.