{"id":291252,"date":"2026-01-29T19:26:30","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T10:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/?p=291252"},"modified":"2026-01-29T19:26:30","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T10:29:50","slug":"terrada-art-award-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/art\/terrada-art-award-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"TERRADA ART AWARD 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

People often refer to Tennoz as an \u201cart city,\u201d but in reality, it doesn\u2019t quite match the typical museum district. The area\u2019s roots are in logistics\u2014warehouses, storage, organizing things. When Warehouse TERRADA<\/a> shifted from simply storing art in the 1970s to pursuing a broader cultural vision, they didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00005\"<\/a>

CLAIRE FUJITA \"Uncontrollable\" 2024-2025 Photos by Matteo Belfiore<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Here, the TERRADA ART AWARD<\/a> isn\u2019t simply another prize\u2014it 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\u2019 initial concepts. Everything flows in a cycle\u2014artists 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\u2019s role as a link between Japan and the international art scene.<\/p>\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00013\"<\/a>What stayed with me from TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 Finalist Exhibition wasn\u2019t a unified style\u2014it 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\u2019s work to another, the show feels more cohesive. Each of the five artists offers their own distinct perspective.<\/p>\r\n

A warehouse is never just an empty shell. It\u2019s always about regulation\u2014regulating the environment, access, security. That\u2019s why TERRADA\u2019s cultural initiative is so intriguing. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00003\"<\/a>

CLAIRE FUJITA \"Reaction ~ver. Dionaea muscipula~\" 2025<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00002\"<\/a>

CLAIRE FUJITA \"Reaction ~ver. Dionaea muscipula~\" 2025<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00032\"<\/a>

CLAIRE FUJITA \"Auto-Pollination\" 2025<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00001\"<\/a>

CLAIRE Fujita \"Reation ~ver. Dionaea muscipula~\" 2025<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Claire Fujita: listening to what does not speakMy strongest response was to Claire Fujita<\/a>. 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\u2019s underlying tension: \u201cPlants 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.\u201dThis is where my mind went to Stefano Mancuso<\/a>\u2014not as an art reference, but as a cultural one. Mancuso\u2019s 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\u2019s work, at its best, makes that mismatch visible: nature \u201cspeaks\u201d 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\u2019s work asks whether we can re-enter a slower ethics of relation\u2014between bodies, between humans, between humans and non-human systems\u2014without turning that ethics into a marketable aesthetic.<\/p>\r\n

Sakura Koretsune: the artist as reporter, the artwork as archive<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00010\"<\/a>

SAKURA KORETSUNE \"Fictional Toys\" 2015-2025<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00033\"<\/a>

SAKURA KORETSUNE \"Fictional Toys\" 2015-2025<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00034\"<\/a>

SAKURA KORETSUNE \"Fictional Toys\" 2015-2025<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00011\"<\/a>

SAKURA KORETSUNE \"Fictional Toys\" 2015-2025<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

<\/a>Sakura Koretsune<\/a>\u2019s work lands differently. She approaches art as a way of doing history. You can sense this reporter-like approach in how she works\u2014traveling, talking to people, gathering things\u2014but she doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t just an abstract idea hidden away in a studio. She builds it from real interactions with people and the lingering remains of what\u2019s vanished. She doesn\u2019t avoid the complicated side of inheritance\u2014how do you hold onto something that society has left behind? Koretsune\u2019s way is to make \u201cfictional toys,\u201d 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\u2019t just piling up artifacts. She\u2019s preserving connections\u2014skills, stories, those cultural leftovers you can\u2019t seal in a climate-controlled vault. Her work is a reminder: archiving isn\u2019t only about saving old objects, it\u2019s about keeping the channels open so people can continue learning and passing things forward.<\/p>\r\n

Yuske Taninaka: reclaiming the body from productivity<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00027\"<\/a>

YUSKE TANINAKA \"Healing for Unsanctioned Timelines (Diagram Project)\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00028\"<\/a>

YUSKE TANINAKA \"Healing for Unsanctioned Timelines (Diagram Project)\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00029\"<\/a>

YUSKE TANINAKA exhibition view<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00031\"<\/a>

YUSKE TANINAKA \"Vagus Practice\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Yuske Taninaka<\/a> articulates a tension that feels increasingly urgent: the tendency to understand the body only through \u201cscientific verifiability\u201d or \u201ceconomic productivity,\u201d and the desire to remain excited by the body\u2019s potential beyond those frameworks.This is not a rejection of science, nor a romantic return to \u201cauthentic\u201d 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\u2014where 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\u2019s stance complicates that logic, asking whether the body can appear in the gallery without being converted into spectacle or proof.<\/p>\r\n

Daisuke Kuroda: the city\u2019s ghosts, empathy and repulsion<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00018\"<\/a>

DAISUKE KURODA \"Sculptor's Table\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00016\"<\/a>

DAISUKE KURODA \"Sculptor's Table\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00019\"<\/a>

DAISUKE KURODA \"Sculptor's Table\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00017\"<\/a>

DAISUKE KURODA \"Sculptor's Table\" 2025-<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Daisuke Kuroda<\/a>\u2019s statement is one of the most direct: he focuses on \u201cghostly presences lingering in the city\u2014forgotten or ignored\u2014and depicts their forms through empathy and repulsion.\u201d This dual affect is important. Tokyo often aestheticizes absence: ruins become Instagram backdrops, marginal spaces become \u201cedgy\u201d scenery. Kuroda\u2019s framing resists that comfort. The \u201cghosts\u201d are not decorative; they are ethical problems.Kuroda\u2019s recent research into sculpture\u2014using sculptors and their processes as motifs\u2014adds 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n

Yuki Kobayashi: self-defense, lineage, and the contemporary body<\/h4>\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00023\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

YUKI KOBAYASHI \"The Wing Chun Project\" 2019-<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00025\"<\/a>

YUKI KOBAYASHI \"The Wing Chun Project\" 2019-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00026\"<\/a>

YUKI KOBAYASHI \"The Wing Chun Project\" 2019-<\/p><\/div>

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00022\"<\/a>

YUKI KOBAYASHI \"The Wing Chun Project\" 2019-<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

Yuki Kobayashi<\/a>\u2019s \u201cWing Chun Project\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014reduced to choreographic aesthetics or \u201cdiscipline\u201d as lifestyle branding. Kobayashi\u2019s 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\u2019s nature as practice rather than object. In Tennoz\u2014where so much is designed to be consumed smoothly\u2014this insistence on practice introduces another tempo: repetition, learning, fatigue, and the sociality of training.<\/p>\r\n

The parallel program: WHAT CAFE and the market layer<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00036\"<\/a>

Photo by TERRADA<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

TERRADA made a smart decision by linking TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 Finalist Exhibition with the WHAT CAFE program. At the same time, WHAT CAFE<\/a> is presenting works from award-winning and selected artists from TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 \u2014fifteen in total. You\u2019ll find older pieces displayed right next to new ones, along with short reflections from the artists about where they are now.<\/p>\r\n

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\u2014begin with the latest projects from this year\u2019s finalists, then move through the past decade to see what previous winners have accomplished since their awards.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00037\"<\/a>

Photo by TERRADA<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

The atmosphere is different, too. WHAT CAFE isn\u2019t simply a gallery; it\u2019s 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\u2019s the real challenge.<\/p>\r\n

NAKED meets Gaud\u00ed: spectacle next door<\/h4>\r\n

Right now, Tennoz is alive with excitement for a major event: \u201cNAKED meets Gaud\u00ed<\/a>,\u201d taking over Warehouse TERRADA (G1) Building from January 10 to March 15, 2026. The whole area is getting involved. There\u2019s a Park G\u00fcell<\/a> model at WHAT MUSEUM, special offers for ticket holders, and even exclusive menus at WHAT CAFE.<\/p>\r\n

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\u2019s clever and it does change the atmosphere.\"adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00038\"<\/a>Here, you get two experiences at once. The Gaud\u00ed<\/a> event is designed to be straightforward, fun, and easy to share\u2014something 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?<\/p>\r\n

Maybe that\u2019s the real theme of this season in Tennoz: attention. There\u2019s only so much to go around, and different types of culture compete for your focus\u2014on one side, the comfort of immersive experiences; on the other, art that demands more from you.<\/p>\r\n

The real strength of the TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 is that it refuses to represent Tokyo\u2019s contemporary art scene with just one approach. Instead, it presents five bold ideas about living with complexity. These works don\u2019t just touch on big themes\u2014they grapple with the systems that shape what we notice, and what gets overlooked: science, history, cities, money, the body. And that\u2019s Tennoz\u2019s peculiar appeal. A place built for control\u2014warehouses, managed spaces, logistics\u2014becomes a setting for questioning control itself.<\/p>\r\n

In a season full of events and drawn toward spectacle, the finalist exhibition quietly makes its point: don\u2019t forget how to pay attention to things that aren\u2019t immediately easy to take in. Stick with what challenges you. That\u2019s where things get interesting.<\/p><\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People often refer to Tennoz as an \u201cart city,\u201d but in reality, it doesn\u2019t quite match the typical museum distr […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":291201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"TERRADA ART AWARD 2025 #adf #npoadf #art #artgallery #exhibition #tokyo","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6],"tags":[36,54,55,68,83,121,306],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/adf-web-magazine-terrada-art-award00005.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}