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 Tomoko Yabumae of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, has the concept of “The Becoming City”. It presents works by three artists, Aiko Tezuka, Asako Fujikura, and Shiori Watanabe.

Toda Corporation, with headquarters in the heart of Tokyo, has been involved in building and rebuilding the city since the Meiji era (1868–1912). Presented in the public spaces of the new Toda Building, this project brings together new works by Aiko Tezuka, Asako Fujikura, and Shiori Watanabe, specifically commissioned for this site, exploring what the city is and how its image might be recast. These works render visible the forces that produce the urban environment: politics, capital, logistics, collective desires, and historical causality. A city is a process of friction in which these forces collide, and it emerges only in an unsettled state of becoming.
Aiko Tezuka imagines the city as a single body, and her work engages with the story of its making and unmaking, the constant cycle of destruction and construction through which the city comes into being. Ceremonial garments from state rituals, antique maps, shopping lists, nail art: through these layered images, extending from the architects of modernity to the everyday lives of people today, an unbroken chain of human making emerges.
If the making of the modern city is bound up with desires that reach vertically upward, Asako Fujikura’s work presents a vision of horizontality. Another entrance opens at the building’s portico, and through it appears an alternative, fictional metropolis governed by the external logic of sunlight.
Even on construction sites pursuing maximum efficiency, the Shinto groundbreaking ceremony remains indispensable. Drawn to such spiritual practices that survive into the present, Shiori Watanabe focuses on the ceramic vessels buried beneath Noh stages as acoustic resonators. Her work listens for echoes of voices that linger in the deep strata of the city and the nation, suppressed during their formation yet never wholly silenced.
The artists’ imaginations introduce subtle and singular details into the pristine space of the new headquarters, inviting us to picture the city beyond the limits of rationality and standardised value systems. When we do, a passage opens onto the deeper inherent richness of the world, dense with accumulated memory, chance, and unforeseeable futures. All the while, these works remind us that everything is in a constant state of becoming, and that no place can ever be controlled or possessed.

—Tomoko Yabumae

*Artist's statement is coming soon.

Aiko Tezuka Embracing What Lives (A Study of TODA CORPORATION’s History)

By taking apart, unraveling, and reweaving textiles and embroidery, Aiko Tezuka renders visible the time and history accumulated within them. In a practice that has grown out of questions about painting, she treats fabric not as a passive support but as a structure in which handwork, technique, and
institutions intersect. In recent years, she has also produced installations that, drawing on emblematic imagery from modern history, link individual lives and bodies to history writ large.

At the entrance, Tezuka stages a space in which the history of the modern city, with its cycles of demolition and rebuilding, can be apprehended in layers. One work, taking its cue from Marshall Islands stick charts (woven frameworks of palm ribs that map ocean swells), takes the form of a map that translates
relations between places into bodily perception. Another, incorporating modern textile history, addresses the theme of the Expo. Shown alongside these is a new work in Nishijin weaving that invokes the history of central Tokyo, including the area around Toda Corporation’s head office, from the late Edo period (1603–1868) to the present, through a bodily imagining of metabolic renewal. Within a space enveloped by ceremonial robes once used in the state ritual of the eye-opening of the Great Buddha at Todai-ji Temple, antique maps, the history of Toda Corporation, and scenes from the building of modern Tokyo
are layered together. Set against this, images such as a stranger’s shopping list the artist picked up on the street, or decorated fingernails, point to the daily lives lived there. Between hard structure and soft body, the contours of the city emerge as a ghostly presence.

Asako Fujikura Open Sunrise City Protocol

Asako Fujikura focuses on the infrastructure and logistics that penetrate cities and suburbs, recasting these landscapes in computer-generated 3D animation. The results are environments rendered at scales beyond the human, or utopian settings glimpsed from non-human vantage points, presented as alternatives to the cities we currently inhabit.

In this work, a fiction unfolding around the imaginary metropolis “Open Sunrise City” is overlaid on present-day scenes from Tokyo’s outskirts, where ongoing development is reshaping the land. The city is a two-tiered world shielded by a colossal rock formation, designed to block an ever-fiercer sun while continuing to admit the morning light with maximum efficiency. Built jointly
by humans and AI, the city itself functions as an operating system, linking vast spans of time in parallel and, possessed of a will of its own, keeping watch over everything that unfolds within it. People stack sun-dried bricks, taking part in the building of the city of their own volition. Cypress trees signal fissures in the
city’s workings, and there are workers who have synchronized themselves to the more-than-human time-scale of the operating system. Within this narrative of control interlaced with deviation, a vision emerges of a city that expands and proliferates outward rather than upward, growing without a center. Seated on the sun-dried bricks piled before the screen, viewers find themselves, in the middle of a real city, immersed in the dream of a city not yet seen, asking why humans need urban spaces at all, and what the conditions of a good life within them might be.

Shiori Watanabe Stock, Jirei

Shiori Watanabe is an artist who examines the complex, tangled systems of relations between humans and other living things, from ecosystems to families, communities, and nations. Her work interrogates the structures through which exclusion and power arise, pursuing a decentered mode of thought.

Stock is a series that expands her signature work Sans room through the process of plant division. In her installation, the circulation of plants, fish, bacteria, and water sustains an environment that regulates itself and continually transforms
itself. In an ongoing project, Watanabe loans this ecosystem to companies for set periods, playing on the double sense of “stock” as shares in a company and as a plant divided at the root for propagation. When the economic life of the city is connected to a nonhuman environment, long-held concepts such as value
and ownership are called into question.

Jirei (Spirits of the Land), a new work created for this project, is inspired by the ceramic jars long buried beneath Noh stages to amplify their acoustics. On an invisible stage formed by a hidden array of jars, voices invoke beings subjugated in the course of the nation’s formation. These figures from legend and folklore include Ura, the ogre said to have been defeated by Momotaro;
the Tsuchigumo (a clan portrayed as spider-like outsiders); and the Hayato (a people of southern Kyushu who were brought under Yamato rule). The space resounds with the foot-stamping of Noh, derived from a ritual practice for warding off evil and purifying the land. Does this sound quiet these long-buried
voices, or call them forth? Just as the earthquakes that have repeatedly struck Japan have both caused destruction and brought about renewal, here the space resonates with ambiguous possibilities.