AWT FOCUS 2025

AWT Focus is Art Week Tokyo’s centerpiece special platform. The exhibition invites a guest curator to experiment with new narratives of modern and contemporary art through works drawn from Art Week Tokyo’s participating galleries.

This year’s edition of AWT Focus is curated by Adam Szymczyk, a curator, author, and editor based in Zurich who was previously the artistic director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel from 2014 to 2017 and the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel from 2003 to 2014. “What Is Real?” brings together some 100 works by more than 50 artists representing diverse generations and geographies. Featuring paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and more, the exhibition revisits the predigital imaging of the 20th and early 21st centuries to see how artists’ responses to the reality of human experience have shifted over time and to understand how we might collectively approach a coming epoch in which powerful new technologies have the capacity to reshape our perceptions of what is real and what is not.