Che Kyongfa Gives Us a Tour of MOCA Tokyo

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) is a prominent art museum in Kiba Park that focuses on postwar Japanese and international contemporary art. Recognized as Japan‘s first major institution dedicated to today’s art landscape, it features a large permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works from 1945 to today, as well as temporary exhibitions, a library, a shop, and dining options. This spring, the museum is presenting three must-see exhibitions: “Sol LeWitt: Open Structure,” “Mission∞Infinity: Space + Quantum + Art,” and “Eric Carle: Art, Books, and the Caterpillar.”

Whitewall spoke with Che Kyongfa, the curator of MOT, about the museum’s upcoming shows and how working alongside artists influences dialogue, curation, and collaboration.

Che Kyongfa’s Approach to Exhibits

WHITEWALL: MOT celebrated its 30th anniversary last year with two celebratory exhibitions, “Nine Profiles: 1935→2025” (August 2–November 24, 2025) and “Choreographies of the Everyday” (August 23–November 24, 2025). When you were shaping these shows, what did you want to revisit? Did you want to let go of anything as the institution looks ahead?

CHE KYONGFA: Over the past three decades, Tokyo has evolved into a city shaped by an unprecedented diversity of social and cultural backgrounds. As a public museum, MOT has responded to these shifts through a range of initiatives — through curatorial practice and public programs, as well as through ongoing efforts to improve physical and infrastructural accessibility. For the 30th anniversary, we chose to address this condition more deliberately by foregrounding a central question: What does publicness mean for a museum today, how is it constituted, and where are its limits drawn?

We sought to work through this inquiry in curatorial practice, through exhibitions developed in close collaboration with emerging and mid-career artists, primarily from Japan and across Asia, alongside performances and workshops that unfolded throughout the exhibition period.

Through these formats, we tried to address that publicness, understood as a foundational condition of democracy, was not treated as a given attribute of the institution or its infrastructure. Instead, it was approached as something provisional and contested, examined through works engaging with challenges arising from different social and historical contexts, and activated through performative and participatory programs within the museum. Taken together, these practices offered viewers an experience in which their relationship to the institutional space was not simply assumed, but actively reconfigured.

If there was something we consciously attempted to let go of, it was the pressure toward visibility and spectacle that often accompanies cultural institutions in the age of social media. Instead, we prioritized modes of engagement that are slower, more layered, and resistant to immediate consumption. This decision also prompted reflection, particularly among those of us working within the institution as cultural producers, on the increasingly tight correlation between institutional governance and neoliberal regimes of visibility, and on the possibilities for operating otherwise.

Over a Decade with MOT

WW: You’ve been at MOT since 2013. Can you tell us about your role and what joy you find in it? 

CK: Since joining MOT in 2013, I have curated seven exhibitions. A consistent point of departure has been the question of what kinds of inquiries can resonate with audiences in Japan while remaining legible across national and cultural boundaries. Many of these projects have focused on artists working in and around Asia, or on practices deeply entangled with the region’s historical and political contexts. In developing them, I worked closely with artists, curators, and cultural organizations both within and outside Japan.

Collaboration is central to this process, as it allows the curatorial framework to be expanded and refined through multiple perspectives. An important curatorial responsibility, as I understand it, lies in shaping visual experiences that enable viewers to encounter unfamiliar perspectives and sensibilities and to re-examine, or unsettle, established historical, political, and social narratives.

My role at MOT encompasses a wide range of tasks, from research into contemporary art and the preparation of grant applications, to coordinating with artists, negotiating with multiple stakeholders, overseeing tender processes, and writing wall texts and editing catalogues. Within this broad scope, what I find most sustaining is working alongside artists as works take shape; engaging in sustained dialogue and exchange with fellow curators; and collaborating with people occupying different positions, including audiences, who are all, in their own ways, involved in contemporary art. 

WW: MOT’s anniversary exhibition, “Choreographies of the Everyday” (August 23-November 24, 2025), centered on gesture, repetition, and the politics of daily life. What drew you to this framework? Why does “the everyday” feel like a meaningful lens at this moment?

CK: Although the exhibition took the museum’s public role as its point of departure, I was keen to avoid arriving at a self-referential project. The framework needed to extend into a wider social context, while remaining closely connected to the lived realities of individual viewers. At a moment when the foundations of democratic publicness are being unsettled by neoliberal governance, social media economies, technological infrastructures, and increasingly authoritarian global politics, I wanted to ask how everyday life is being shaped, and how individual subjectivity and agency might be rethought within these conditions.

The works in the exhibition articulate forms of resistance and dissent against various constraints, expressed through a wide range of artistic languages. Through these practices, we aimed to show that the spaces and infrastructures we inhabit—including museums—are shaped by power, but are also continually sustained, negotiated, and sometimes transformed through people’s actions.

In this sense, the term choreography refers both to gestures regulated by systems embedded in everyday life, and to gestures that depart from or disrupt those systems.

Articulating Language with Art

WW: In the recent past, you’ve worked with artists like Ho Tzu Nyen and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, whose work defies easy interpretation. What kind of space do you want MOT to be for practices that are research-driven and politically nuanced?

CK: In my experience, both Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Ho Tzu Nyen’s work articulate that new forms of language are necessary to understand the past from the vantage point of the present. This impulse is closely tied to their sustained experimentation with moving-image practices. 

Their works therefore demand a mode of attention that resists speed and immediacy. Rather than offering images for instant consumption, they insist on thinking with images, foregrounding the critical stakes of how images are produced, presented, and interpreted.

I hope MOT can be a place where such practices—research-driven, politically nuanced, and formally demanding—can be encountered without simplification, and where taking the time to look and think critically is understood as an essential public practice.

WW: This spring, the museum is presenting shows on Sol LeWitt and Eric Carle. How do these shows speak to the focus of the museum’s curatorial and educational efforts? 

CK: Taken together, these exhibitions articulate what we understand as MOT’s sustained commitment to contemporary art, while approaching visual culture from a deliberately broad perspective. They reflect an effort to remain attentive to emerging cultural currents, while responding to the increasingly diverse interests and expectations of our audiences.

Alongside these temporary and wide-ranging exhibitions, we continue to present large-scale collection displays drawn from nearly 6,000 works, primarily centered on postwar Japanese art and curated from multiple perspectives. This ongoing engagement with the collection provides a longer historical frame against which contemporary practices can be situated and reconsidered. Anchored in contemporary art, we see MOT’s role as that of a cultural institution deeply committed to introducing visual expression across genres and disciplines—a position that requires not only curatorial rigor, but also a capacity for institutional imagination. 

WW: This year, you’re taking on roles outside of MOT as curator for the 2026 Gwangju Biennale. How do these outside projects feed back into how you think about MOT’s evolution and what museums can be today?

CK: Working in contexts shaped by different social and historical conditions, and within formats distinct from the museum, allows me to step outside familiar curatorial frameworks and compels a reconfiguration of how I think and see. The Gwangju Biennale is one of the most significant biennales internationally, and its scale—spatially, temporally, and institutionally—differs fundamentally from that of a museum exhibition.

The upcoming edition is directed by Ho Tzu Nyen, with whom I worked closely on his solo exhibition at MOT in 2024, together with Brian Kuan Wood and Gahee Park. What has been particularly instructive in this collaboration is the opportunity to observe how an artist’s mode of thinking and sensibility is translated into curatorial structure and decision-making. Curating a large-scale exhibition with an artist, rather than for one, is an experience that rarely occurs within the conditions of a permanent museum institution.

As a curatorial team, we are not only developing an exhibition, but also reflecting on the contemporary relevance of the biennale itself—both in Gwangju and within a broader global context—as well as on the systems that sustain such large-scale, episodic exhibitions. This reflexive dimension has become an integral part of the project.

Even at this early stage, the process has prompted a recalibration of how I understand the role of a permanent institution such as MOT. It has sharpened my awareness of both its structural limitations and its specific potentials. Holding these two aspects in view feels essential when considering what kinds of projects can meaningfully emerge from a particular place and moment—what can, and perhaps should, be realized here and now.

WW: How do you like to spend your time outside of the museum, in Tokyo?

CK: Tokyo is a city where something is always happening, and keeping up with exhibitions can be difficult. I rarely manage to do so since most of my time is taken up with raising two children outside my work. What I value most in everyday life is walking home through Tokyo late at night, after working late or after spending time with friends—when my partner looks after the children. The city is quieter and feels different, yet safe enough for me to let my thoughts drift as I walk.