The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo sits at the edge of Kiba Park in Koto-ku — one of Tokyo's eastern wards, at a remove from the gallery clusters of Ginza and Harajuku, which attracts visitors with a specific reason to make the journey. The building, designed by Yanagisawa Takahiko and completed in 1995, is large by Japanese museum standards: the permanent collection covers post-war Japanese and international contemporary art across multiple floors, with natural light entering through a central atrium that runs the building's vertical axis. The approach through Kiba Park adds twenty minutes on foot from the nearest station and arrives at the museum from the east, which is the quieter direction. The collection's holdings in Japanese mono-ha sculpture, postwar abstraction, and the Gutai group are particularly significant. The temporary programme occupies the upper floors; the permanent collection below has the density and focus of a serious institutional collection rather than a survey.
Koto, Tokyo, Japan