While artists from different generations intermingle on this floor—the theme of which is an exploration of abstraction and expression in painting—their pioneering spirit is clear to see.

In the 1970s, when painting was coming to be increasingly considered an outdated medium, Bernard Frize argued that painting had the potential to present new worlds, even within the strict limitations of a flat surface and square canvas; Katharina Grosse studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a driving force behind avant-garde art, and worked to subvert painterly concepts time and again; Leiko Ikemura left Japan and lived in European countries including Spain and Germany, where she has produced both paintings and sculptures, traversing the distinct spiritualities of East and West.

Meanwhile, artists such as Oscar Murillo, a Turner Prize winner born in 1986, Jadé Fadojutimi, Misheck Masamvu, and Lauren Quin are also featured. We invite you to come and see how works from different generations resonate with one another across time.

On the first floor, visitors pass a well-known work by Kohei Nawa to find spaces dedicated to Mika Tajima and Kenjiro Okazaki, before being led up the stairs by the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The second floor houses a series of rooms where visitors can discover the respective worldviews of a range of international artists.

Ryan Gander reinterprets the everyday world from his ironical perspective; Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois embody the flexibility of women living in contemporary society; and Theaster Gates has produced work after work based on confronting the challenges faced by minorities and other communities. The roster also includes leading minimalist artist Dan Flavin, as well as Ryoji Ikeda, Olafur Eliasson, Chiharu Shiota, Mika Tajima, teamLab, and Takashi Murakami.

The central room juxtaposes two prominent contemporary German photographers: Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. Please enjoy this tour through contemporary expression that intersects across and transcends differences in medium, technique, nation, or region.

Despite living in close proximity, and in the same era, the landscapes that people see differ, as do the mental images they draw from those landscapes. This floor presents paintings by Japanese women artists of similar generations.

The Shōwa and Heisei eras could be described as a period in which Japanese society had reached a certain maturity and experienced the instability, uncertainty, and fluctuation that such maturity brings. Each artist processed those times through the prism of their own gaze. Miyuki Tsugami layers events from and experiences of the places she visits; Kei Imazu’s daily life as an artist intersects with a contemporary society surrounded by digital environments; Aki Kondo reminds viewers of the energy that flows within people, and of each individual’s respective happiness; and Makiko Kudo evokes primal landscapes born from overlapping memories of everyday life.

The distance between the work and the individual varies widely from artist to artist, but a mixture of the artists’ daily lives is seen in these works, including the environments they grapple with and the primal landscapes of their childhoods. Floating beyond the brushstrokes that remain in their paintings, the viewer sees the figure of the artist who has kept on painting.

This room begins with Hiraki Sawa’s work “/home, /home (absence),” in which the crisscrossing flight of airplanes within a room evokes both a gaze that longs for the wider world outside that small space and the ephemerality of such a dream. This exhibition space focuses on the beauty of change, of fluctuation, and of things that disappear with the passage of time.

Aiko Miyanaga’s works in naphthalene change shape as the result of chemical transformation, as sublimation leads to a gradual shift from figurative motifs to crystalline forms. Meanwhile, Ritsue Mishima’s works in glass capture and fix the amorphous forms of glass flowing at high temperatures, using glass in its role as a preservation device that seems to stop time for the glass itself.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s work using LED counters—in which the counters continually blink and change count, one after the other, with only the number 0 (zero) blacked out—evokes ideas such as endings and beginnings, and the reincarnation of the soul. Here, you are able to catch a glimpse of expressive worlds born from the relationships between light, form, and materials.

On this floor are displayed large-scale works by Yoko Matsumoto, who explored painting in acrylics during the oil-centric era of abstract expressionism in Japan.

Matsumoto was influenced by the abstract expressionism she encountered in New York in the 1960s, as well as by the techniques of ink painting, such as those of Sumi-e, and has turned her attention to the way that color is not subordinate to form, but rather color gives rise to form. The artist carefully layers light, shade, and hue to build multi-layered spaces on the canvas that combine opacity and transparency, in paintings given shape by intense energy and unrestrained physicality.

She avoids working things out beforehand or making preliminary sketches, liberating her intuition to create a variety of contours and hues, guided by the experiences that her body has accumulated. Matsumoto’s work has been garnering worldwide acclaim in recent years, triggered in part by an exhibition in London. One feels that Matsumoto is not an isolated case, but rather part of the beginnings of a broader trend as we enter an era of growing worldwide recognition of Japanese women artists.