From Bakurocho, Nihonbashi, Tokyo, CON_ is a gallery that continues to create new connections between contemporary art and urban culture. Since opening in 2022, CON_ has presented a diverse program that moves beyond the boundaries of art, engaging with the ever-evolving expressions of Tokyo across music, fashion, street culture, and digital culture.
For this year’s Tokyo Gendai, CON_ presents a solo booth dedicated to Yukino Yamanaka. Free from established frameworks, the presentation explores how the sensibilities emerging from Tokyo today can be translated into contemporary art.
“CON_” has been presenting highly stimulating exhibitions since its opening in 2022, bringing Tokyo’s underground youth culture, street culture, and digital sensibilities into dialogue with the context of contemporary art. For visitors encountering the gallery for the first time at Tokyo Gendai, could you tell us about the gallery’s unique beginnings and the concepts that are important to your practice?
CON_ is a gallery that opened in April 2022 in Bakurocho, Nihonbashi, Tokyo. The name comes from the prefix “con”—as in connection, context, and conflict—and reflects our guiding principle of continually connecting with different things, ideas, and communities.
The gallery itself is a raw concrete space, quite different from the conventional white-cube gallery. Because it is not necessarily a space where you can simply hang works on the walls and call it an exhibition, we have developed each presentation together with the artists through ongoing dialogue, treating the act of exhibiting itself as part of the creative process.
What we are interested in is the process of how value comes into being and how it develops. We want to look beyond the finished artwork and consider the artist’s life, relationships, and the circumstances surrounding the work. We hope that visitors to our booth will be able to experience that atmosphere as well.
Your gallery has actively supported artists whose practices are rooted not only in the traditional context of fine art, but also in graffiti, internet culture, and other forms of expression that capture the energy of the city and the street. From your broader perspective as a gallery, how do you see the growing interest in, and recognition of, practices rooted in street and youth culture within the global contemporary art market in recent years?
We do not particularly think of what we do as being rooted in “street culture.” Rather, it is closer to saying that we have never intended to focus exclusively on fine art. Urban culture is one of CON_’s central themes, and we have always moved back and forth between fields such as music and fashion. The artists we work with also move between different cultural spheres in their practices, but this is not a strategy. It is simply a natural consequence of living and working in Tokyo.
What has changed, rather, is the market itself. It has begun to accept this kind of cross-disciplinary practice not as an “exception,” but as a given. Rather than categorizing practices that do not exist entirely within the established systems of fine art as “alternative” and placing them to one side, we want to see them properly recognized and integrated into the mechanisms of evaluation and circulation. That is what we are trying to do.
The alternative and open atmosphere of your space in Bakurocho has always been exciting for visitors. For this year’s Tokyo Gendai, a major international art fair bringing together leading galleries and collectors from around the world, what challenges did you take on in shaping your booth and presentation while maintaining CON_’s distinctive edge and critical perspective?
This time, we are presenting a solo booth dedicated to Yukino Yamanaka. Rather than translating what we do in Bakurocho for the fair and diluting it in the process, we have chosen to take the opportunity to present one artist’s practice in depth.
Together with Yamanaka, we are developing the booth through dialogue, not simply as a space where individual works are placed side by side, but as a presentation in which the sensibility of her painting can emerge throughout the booth as a whole.
In this presentation, are there any particular works or aspects of the artist’s practice that you would like to highlight as embodying “the real energy of Tokyo today” for art audiences in Japan and abroad?
I think what Yuki Yamanaka has consistently depicted is not so much the human figure itself, but transformation. Rather than fixing the human body as a defined “image,” she attempts to capture those moments in which its contours begin to dissolve and shift into something else—the state of being in transition.
The material elements of painting—strokes, drips, smudges, and areas of blank space—are not simply techniques in her work; they become the very sites where transformation takes place. The movement of paint as it flows, bleeds, and breaks off overlaps with the movement of the depicted body as it shifts from a sense of “self” toward an ambiguous “other.” What we see is not a finished image, but a painting in the process of becoming.
As suggested by the poses that evoke selfies, we now live within an image environment shaped by social media, constantly editing and redefining the contours of our own identities. The feeling that the self cannot be fixed, that we are always in the midst of transformation—Yamanaka does not critique this condition from the outside. Instead, she embraces that very sensation as an aesthetic in itself. That is where I feel a strong sense of contemporaneity in her work.
What are your thoughts on the Japanese art scene and on the enthusiastic audiences from Japan and abroad who gather at Tokyo Gendai? And what message would you like visitors to take away from your booth at this year’s fair?
Tokyo’s art scene is often viewed from the outside as something already “complete,” but in reality, it is very much still in the process of evolving. One of the reasons we, as a young gallery, are participating in the fair is to show that process openly, without hiding the fact that it is still unfolding.
What we want visitors to see in our booth is not a finished result, but the process itself. I think a fair is the ideal setting for people to engage with—and, hopefully, enjoy—that process.
Thank you very much! We look forward to seeing your work in September.
Experience Tokyo’s ever-evolving now at Tokyo Gendai.
Dates:
11-13 September 2026 (Fri-Sun) *Vernissage: 10 September (Thu)
Venue:
Pacifico Yokohama
Booth:
CON_
Ticket Purchase:
CON_
Established in April 2022 in Bakurocho, Nihombashi, Tokyo, CON_ develops a multidisciplinary program that explores contemporary art alongside a wide range of creative and cultural practices, with a focus on bringing visuality and conceptual thinking into dialogue.
