Steph C.
Yelp
We went to the Mori Art Museum right at opening on a Saturday morning. It wasn't on our agenda, but it was 10 a.m. and we had an hour to kill in Roppongi Hills, and all the stores were closed until 11. An hour was enough time to get through the small museum, but we could have used another. We kind of rushed through the exhibition and didn't have time to visit the Skydeck, which seems like part of the experience (though it requires a separate ticket). The museum is on the 53rd floor of Mori Tower, but it doesn't have any windows.
This is, I'm sure, to protect the art, which is the whole point of the Mori Art Museum. We caught the tail end of the current exhibition, which runs through this weekend (so if you're one of the five English readers cruising Yelp for Tokyo museum reviews this week...go go go!). It's called WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects, and it's a cool survey education through a thoughtful selection of artwork, pulled from the museum's collection and various other sources. We accidentally started going the wrong way, and ended up running through empty exhibit rooms backwards and catching a quiet preview before joining the rest of the morning museum crowd.
The exhibition was charmingly laid out by school subject: math, philosophy, language, science, etc. This meant the scope was pretty wide, and I'm sure the curators had fun grouping the art according to these broad themes. It was all very cute, but not overly so, and we saw some amazing, thought-provoking art. I loved works by Lee Ufan and Sam Falls, artists from Korea and Southern California. I was also quite struck by the "Bomb Pond" series by Cambodian-born photographer Vandy Rattana, serene images of ponds formed in craters left by American bombs during the Vietnam War. There were two pretty iconic works by Ai Weiwei: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a series of photographs of the artist dropping and breaking a 2,000-year-old urn; and positioned in front of it, an antique vase painted with the Coca-Cola logo.
In one little room, I hung out with "Miss Moonlight," a 2020 painting by Yoshitomo Nara, of a serene young girl with her eyes gently closed. There was a jigsaw puzzle of this painting in the museum store, and I actually came back to Mori Tower to buy it later that day, when I realized I couldn't get the puzzle online (it seemed like a bulky purchase right at the beginning of our trip, but I was otherwise happy to support the museum). The museum store was great, incidentally. It was in two spaces, one inside the museum and one just outside, where you could go shop without admission. It's worth checking out if you're in Mori Tower and want to see a cool museum store.
We went to teamLabs Planets later in our trip, and I was kind of disturbed by the weird soullessness and immense popularity of the place, which is billed as an art museum but feels more like a cynically erected series of Instagram ops. I'm glad we made it to Mori Art Museum and would highly recommend it if you want to see contemporary art in Tokyo that might evoke, say, thought and emotion. I don't know what future exhibitions might hold, but I'm grateful that we got to catch this one.