Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2012

Every year Art Fair Tokyo comes around and every year it tries to find a big idea to tie everything together and sell the event. Last year, it was all about picking up the pieces following the big earthquake, a natural enough storyline and certainly a compelling one for the event. This year, it’s time to move on and find a new narrative for the weekend of art.

With Deutsche Bank Group serving as the main sponsor and the President of Art Fair Tokyo a former trader in the financial industry, not surprisingly they’ve gone for the idea of internationalizing the Japanese art world by reaching out to the rest of Asia.

This year’s slogan is “Tokyo as a city within Asia,” and there is a new section called “Discover Asia,” where prominent galleries from major Asian cities will be showcased along with Japanese galleries that have been receiving international acclaim.

But this is all fanfare, hullabaloo, and design by committee. The real story, as it is every year, is the individual story of each visitor. With more than 160 participating galleries, what Tokyo Art Fair does best is to present a great deal of real variety, simply because it is impossible to get so many galleries toeing the same line.

This is not like, say, going to a Jackson Pollock exhibit, deciding halfway through you don’t really care for the pissed-off guy with a paint can, and then having to endure the rest of the exhibition. With AFT, there’s always something completely different in the next booth.
In such an environment, subjective taste is king and each visitor will put together his or her own unique “exhibition” simply by following his or her artistic nose. With this in mind, here are some of my picks from the forthcoming fair.

Art Fair Tokyo, Mar 30-Apr 1 at Tokyo International Forum (listing).