Art Week Tokyo was founded under pandemic conditions in November 2021 as a new, hybrid art event motivated by an ethos of community building and resource sharing. The annual citywide initiative brings more than 50 of Tokyo’s leading institutions, galleries, and art spaces together on a shared platform through coordinated programming and a network of free buses connecting all venues. In putting different art spaces in dynamic relation with each other as well their surrounding neighborhoods, Art Week Tokyo makes visible the breadth, depth, and richness of the art ecosystem of one of the world’s cultural capitals, appealing to both locals and visitors alike. The event has grown yearly with new programmes and participants, quickly establishing itself as a convening point on the international art calendar. And it has achieved all this by staking out an alternate position to market-oriented events where sales are the primary measure of success, while still acknowledging the important role commercial galleries play in supporting and sustaining art activity.
In this talk, Andrew Maerkle, the editorial director of Art Week Tokyo, will provide an overview of the event and its development. In particular, he will address how Art Week Tokyo employs processes of transportation and translation—both of which imply a notional carrying over or displacement—to negotiate the shifting relations of center and margin that structure the local art scene and its place in the broader world. While Art Week Tokyo’s dispersed, mobile format responds to the specific conditions for life in Tokyo, could it become a model for the cooperative redistribution of cultural capital elsewhere too?
This event will take place online. Booking is required.
About Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice
Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice is a talk and editorial series initiated by esea contemporary Director Xiaowen Zhu, exploring how contemporary art is shaped beyond dominant cultural centres. Bringing together artists, curators, writers, and researchers working across East and Southeast Asia, the series foregrounds practices rooted in specific places, where artistic work develops through everyday life, local knowledge, and long-term engagement with communities.
Together, the talks and accompanying essays consider how artistic practice is shaped by lived conditions rather than institutional proximity. Tracing connections across diverse contexts through questions of care, labour, knowledge, and placemaking, they attend to the ways art is produced, circulated, and sustained within situated environments, while asking how these sites, in turn, generate their own cultural imaginaries and forms of collective life.
Andrew Maerkle is a writer, editor, and translator based in Tokyo. He is currently the editorial director of Art Week Tokyo. From 2010 to 2024 he was the deputy editor of the bilingual online publication ART iT. From 2006 to 2008 he was the deputy editor of ArtAsiaPacific in New York, where he helped create the annual Almanac edition. Maerkle is a contributor to international magazines, including Aperture, Art & Australia, Artforum, and frieze, as well as numerous catalogues and monographs. His book of translations, Kishio Suga: Writings, vol. 2, 1980–1989, was published by Skira in 2025. That same year he was coconvener of a satellite event for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Invocation #4: Tokyo, “Bukimi no Tani (不気味の谷): The Uncanny Valley—The Affectivity of the Humanoid,” held at multiple venues across Tokyo. From 2018 to 2023 he taught in the Graduate School of Global Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts.
