Can a Regional Art Show Speak to the World? The Aichi Triennale Makes a Convincing Case

In an era when global biennials and triennials seem to appear with ever-increasing frequency, organizing a major international art event outside of traditional art world hubs has become a daunting challenge. It is not uncommon for these initiatives to fall into the trap of vague and grandiose narration. The real test lies in how a regional biennial or triennial can balance local grounding with global ambition, all while responding to the pressing urgencies of politics, environmental crises, and cultural conflict.

The 2025 edition of the Aichi Triennale, one of Japan’s leading international art festivals held every three years since 2010, manages to meet this moment with rare clarity. Titled “A Time Between Ashes and Roses,” this year’s edition is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, who drew inspiration from a poem by modernist Syrian poet Adonis. Written in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, Adonis’s verses lament environmental devastation while also making space for regeneration and hope.

“This exhibition brings a lot of these issues to the forefront—our destruction of the planet and all living things—but also a reminder of how connected we are to this earth,” said Al Qasimi, who has also spoken publicly about the ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis. “This Triennale serves as a reminder that we all live under the same sky, and none of us are free until all of us are free.” That political resonance was felt even during the opening on September 13, when a small protest briefly took place outside one of the venues.

Her and the curatorial team’s vision for the sixth edition of the event focuses on how humans relate to their environment, in which the exhibition seeks to “unearth alternative land-based and Indigenous assemblages,” while challenging anthropocentric perspectives that frame land purely in terms of territory, nationhood, or resource extraction. Instead, the works on view encourage viewers to consider the environment not as a passive backdrop, but as a co-agent with its own timelines and memory—sometimes geological, sometimes ancestral.

This curatorial ethos is reflected not only in the artworks selected, but also in the exhibition design itself. Across multiple venues, installations echo the visual language of natural history museums. Rather than adopting a didactic or overtly activist tone, the shows favor an atmospheric, geological pace—eschewing binary oppositions in favor of slow, layered unfolding. After all, when breathing the same ocean air, it is often the subtle and specific—rather than the grand and abstract—that allows us to relate across distance, to feel the elsewhere within the here.

This orientation is visible in the artist lineup. Among the 61 participating artists and collectives, the majority are from non-Western backgrounds, many with Indigenous heritage. Japan, as the host country, is well represented with 26 artists, but much of the remaining roster comes from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. Notably, there is a strong presence of Southeast Asian and Indigenous Australian voices, while East Asia is relatively underrepresented—only two artist groups (ikkibawiKrrr and Kwon Byungjun) are from Korea.

This is a Triennale worth experiencing in person—and you have until November 30 to do so. But before you go, here’s a preview of three (group) works, among all, that I encountered on site.

Ota Saburo, Mizutani Kiyoshi, Miyamoto Saburo, and Hiroshi Sugimoto at
Aichi Arts Center

In a spacious room at the Nagoya City Art Museum, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s large-format photographs are displayed alongside mural works by three painters—Ota Saburo, Mizutani Kiyoshi, and Miyamoto Saburo—from the postwar era. The presentation evokes the subdued ambiance of a natural history museum, offering an understated counterpoint to the immersive videos and large-scale installations that dominate much of the Triennale.

The three murals were originally commissioned in the aftermath of World War II as part of a project to revive Nagoya’s Higashiyama Zoo, which had been devastated by the war. In 1944, as air raids intensified, large carnivores were culled at the military’s request over fears they might escape and harm civilians. Disease and starvation further decimated the zoo’s population, from over 3,000 animals across 300 species to just over 20 survivors. To compensate for the absence of these creatures, local newspapers proposed the creation of murals depicting animals from around the world—a gesture of both remembrance and imagination.

Sugimoto’s celebrated “Dioramas” series began in 1975, when he encountered the astonishingly detailed wildlife displays at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Over the next 40 years, he photographed dioramas across the United States. Many of the background paintings were created by artists who had actually visited the depicted regions during the golden age of diorama-making, spanning the 1920s to 1940s. Shot with 20-minute exposures, Sugimoto’s images could easily be mistaken for photographs of living animals.

The juxtaposition in this room is quietly poignant. These works resist spectacle, instead offering a space for reflection on extinction, memory, and the long arc of natural history.

Sasaki Rui at Seto City

For the first time, the Aichi Triennale has included Seto City as one of its three main venues. Since its second edition, the Triennale has made it a point to incorporate cities beyond Nagoya—such as Toyota City in 2019—into its programming.

This year, 11 artists’ works are dispersed throughout Seto, a city long known as the heart of Japan’s ceramic industry. With a legacy of embracing new techniques and cultural influences, Seto provides a fitting context for site-specific installations. The trio in Seto City feels more like a hike, tucked into speakeasy-like settings—including abandoned elementary schools, ceramic factories, and ordinary residential neighborhoods—that invite visitors to engage with art through exploration.

Japanese artist Sasaki Rui transformed a former family-run sento (public bathhouse) into an immersive installation that reflects Seto’s intertwined social and ecological histories. Collaborating with local residents, Sasaki collected seasonal plants tied to different eras of the city’s evolution—from species that predate the ceramics boom, to trees once felled for kiln fuel, and flora preserved or naturalized through industrial activity. Encased in reclaimed glass from old (folk houses) and deadstock from a local glass factory, these specimens emit a ghostly green glow in the darkened bathhouse, like lingering spirits in the room.

Installed where hot water once filled the communal bath, the glossy, translucent glass recalls the fluidity of water, yet its material permanence stands in stark contrast to water’s transience. Sasaki wanted to preserve fading memories and embodied experiences, holding time still in a fragile yet enduring form.

Wangechi Mutu at Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum

Wangechi Mutu’s striking sculpture (2014–2025) has slithered into Japan. Measuring approximately 9.5 meters long, the black snake lies quietly coiled on the floor, its belly swollen. A blue ceramic head rests peacefully on a matching pillow, surrounded by personal objects, including four newly added small ceramic objects that respond to the site. The sculpture’s head is a self-portrait Mutu made in her youth and kept for over a decade before finally integrating it into the piece.

The exhibition offers Mutu a remarkably generous space for expression. In another gallery, her three-channel video (2015) is on view. A female figure—evoking an archetype of African womanhood—walks uphill with a basket on her head, which grows increasingly heavy with modern detritus. Eventually, she and her burden morph into a massive form that plummets off a cliff. “It connected to interests that I’ve always had,” Mutu explains, “this worry I have about the earth, the environment, and how we are implicated in that… how every gesture we participate in impacts the planet, impacts other people, impacts women.”

Across from the video, Mutu has handwritten a statement on the wall, paying tribute to the late Kenyan environmentalist and feminist Wangari Maathai. The show even spills into the museum’s courtyard, where two monumental bronze baskets—modeled after handmade Kikapú baskets from Kenya—house ancient symbolic creatures. One holds a large green snake evoking duality, mythic power, and wisdom. The other contains an African sea turtle representing beauty, resilience, patience, and longevity.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com