APK PUBLIC Vol.2
The common space of the Toda Building will be used as a venue for forward-looking public art, offering emerging artists and curators opportunities to present large-scale works that engage with the urban landscape. APK Public is a public art program that enriches the ways people live and work, allowing visitors and office workers to engage with artworks on a daily basis, and aiming to stimulate creativity and expand perspectives.
Vol. 2, curated by Yabumae Tomoko of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, has the concept of The Becoming City. It presents works by three artists, Tezuka Aiko, Fujikura Asako, and Watanabe Shiori.
The Becoming City
Located in the heart of Tokyo, Toda Corporation has contributed to shaping the city’s development since the Meiji era (1868–1912). Presented in the public spaces of the company’s new headquarters building, this project poses the question of what a city is and offers keys to reimagining it through new works by three artists. These works render visible the forces that give form to urban spaces, including politics and capital, logistics, social aspirations, and historical cause and effect. A city emerges through constant friction, as these forces collide and appear in configurations that are always unstable. Spaces go through repeated cycles of formation and collapse. Portals open to other decentered possible worlds. Suppressed voices lie dormant in older layers. Within the finished spaces of the new building, these are manifested through the artists’ imaginations, and lead us to imagine the city from a different perspective, departing from present-day efficiency and uniform systems of value. In this process, a channel opens through which we can sense the world’s inherent richness, with all its accumulated memory, chance, and unpredictable futures.
—Yabumae Tomoko
INFORMATION
- Dates
June, 2026 - November, 2027
- Venue
Toda Building
- Admission
Free
- Organizer
Toda Corporation
- Artists
TEZUKA Aiko, FUJIKURA Asako, WATANABE Shiori
- Curator
YABUMAE Tomoko
ARTISTS
TEZUKA Aiko
Born in Tokyo in 1976. Lives and works in Berlin and Tokyo. In 2001, she completed a master’s degree in painting at Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and in 2005, she completed the doctoral program in painting at Kyoto City University of Arts. From 2010 to 2011, she lived and worked in London after receiving the Gotoh Cultural Award Newcomer’s Prize in Art. She subsequently moved to Berlin on a fellowship from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists. Since 1997, she has produced works in which she unravels and reconfigures woven materials, drawing on and editing historical forms to create new structures. Tezuka’s works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin; and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, among many others.
The State Guest Houses (Weaving in Progress, Meiji to Reiwa)
Tsuzure (traditional hand weaving), cotton, rayon, wooden weaving shuttle
Cooperation on the material provision: the Osaka Museum of History, Sou Fujimoto Architects
Fabric development, production and donation to Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan by Kawashima Selkon Textiles Co., Ltd.
Photo by MORIYA Yuki
FUJIKURA Asako
Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1992. Lives and works in Tokyo. Fujikura focuses on infrastructure that links cities and suburbs and how landscapes take shape around it, and produces works primarily using 3D computer animation. In recent years, she has pursued a spatial practice that foregrounds the dynamism of logistics constantly unfolding across reclaimed land and the emergence of gardens within the city. Recent exhibitions include Machine Love: Video Games, AI, and Contemporary Art (Mori Art Museum, 2025) and In-Between: A Future with Generative AI (Japan Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2025).
Impact Tracker 2023, Video ©︎Asako Fujikura
WATANABE Shiori
Born in Tokyo in 1984. Graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts in 2015, and completed graduate studies at the same university in 2017. Sans room, an installation widely known as one of Watanabe’s key works, links tanks in which plants, fish, and bacteria collected from the Imperial Palace, where she often played as a child, are cultivated, with water circulated between them to form an artificial ecosystem. Underlying her practice is a unique approach to observing the dynamics of extinction, conservation, and exclusion at play among all species, the nation-state as an aggregation viewed from an ecological perspective, and the ties between nature and human activity embedded in folk customs and ritual practices.
sans room 2025, mixed media
Installation view of exhibition "宿 / Syuku"
Photo by KATO Ken
CURATOR
YABUMAE Tomoko
Born in Tokyo in 1974. As the curator of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, she was in charge of curating the following exhibitions: Shinro Ohtake Zen-kei Retrospective 1955-2006 (2006), Sayoko Yamaguchi: The Wearist, Clothed in the Future (2015), An Art Exhibition for Children: Whose place is this? (2015), Eiko Ishioka: Blood, Sweat, and Tears-A Life of Design (2020), Christian Marclay Translating (2021), A Personal View of Japanese Contemporary Art; Takahashi Ryutaro Collection (2024) and Kenjiro Okazaki 而今而後 Time Unfolding Here (2025). She also curated Sapporo International Art Festival 2017 and others. Her writing on contemporary art and culture as a whole has appeared in numerous journals and web media.