Five Ways of Reading the World

What does it mean to "read" the world? Not simply to observe it, but to move through it, interpret it and allow ourselves to be transformed by encounters with the unknown. This question lies at the heart of Ways of Reading - How the World Speaks to Us, How We Speak to the World, the major exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, on view from November 19, 2026, to January 11, 2027. Rather than presenting a conventional survey of masterpieces, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive journey through sculpture, photography, poetry, ceramics and installation art, bringing together five artists from different generations and cultural backgrounds: Alberto Giacometti, Bikky Sunazawa, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Elena Tutatchikova and Momo Yamanishi. Their works create a dialogue spanning nearly a century of artistic practice while reflecting on the many ways human beings engage with reality. The exhibition concludes the museum's centenary programme. Founded in 1926 as Japan's first public art museum, the institution uses this anniversary not to revisit its own history but to reaffirm its mission of fostering new ways of seeing. Instead of following a chronological narrative, the exhibition invites visitors to experience five different approaches to understanding the world: reading through light, time, words, nature and the body. The journey begins with Alberto Giacometti, whose iconic elongated figures are presented as works in constant transformation. Light becomes the sculptor's true material, continually reshaping the viewer's perception. Alongside bronzes and plaster sculptures by the Swiss master are photographs by Ernst Scheidegger, who documented Giacometti's Paris studio for more than twenty years, revealing the artist's endless cycle of making, destroying and remaking his works. Sharing the same gallery are photographs by Japanese artist Momo Yamanishi, created with a handmade pinhole camera during a journey through Nepal. Her images connect the optical phenomenon of the camera obscura with the geological time embodied in ammonite fossils, turning photography into a meditation on matter, memory and transformation. The exhibition then pays tribute to Shuntaro Tanikawa, one of the most influential voices in postwar Japanese literature, who passed away in 2024. Rather than focusing solely on his poetry, the exhibition reveals a lesser-known aspect of his creative practice through photographs taken in the early 1950s - many of them exhibited for the first time - alongside handwritten notebooks and vintage radios that accompanied his early artistic experiments. Together they portray an artist for whom poetry, photography and sound were complementary ways of engaging with language and the world. The section devoted to Bikky Sunazawa, one of Japan's most important Ainu sculptors, transports visitors to the remote landscapes of Hokkaido. His monumental wooden sculptures, carved from massive tree trunks, express a relationship with nature based not on mastering matter but on listening to its rhythms. The exhibition also includes works from private collections that will be shown in Tokyo for the first time. The exhibition concludes with Elena Tutatchikova, the Moscow-born artist now based in Kyoto, who has created a new body of ceramic sculptures, reliefs, paintings and animations especially for the occasion. Her installations transform the act of walking into a form of knowledge, suggesting that imagination, perception and movement belong to a single process through which we construct our experience of the world. Far from being a conventional institutional celebration, the exhibition pursues a far more ambitious goal. On the occasion of its centenary, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum chooses not to focus on its own past but on art's enduring ability to reshape the way we see.