EVENTS & PROGRAMS

APK PUBLIC Vol.2

Open

2026/6/1 Mon. ～ 2027/11/30 Tue.

The common space of the Toda Building will be used as a venue for forward-looking public art, offering emerging artists and curators opportunities to present large-scale works that engage with the urban landscape. APK Public is a public art program that enriches the ways people live and work, allowing visitors and office workers to engage with artworks on a daily basis, and aiming to stimulate creativity and expand perspectives.

Vol. 2, curated by Tomoko Yabumae of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, has the concept of “The Becoming City”. It presents works by three artists, Aiko Tezuka, Asako Fujikura, and Shiori Watanabe.

The Becoming City

Toda Corporation, with headquarters in the heart of Tokyo, has been involved in building and rebuilding the city since the Meiji era (1868–1912). Presented in the public spaces of the new Toda Building, this project brings together new works by Aiko Tezuka, Asako Fujikura, and Shiori Watanabe, specifically commissioned for this site, exploring what the city is and how its image might be recast. These works render visible the forces that produce the urban environment: politics, capital, logistics, collective desires, and historical causality. A city is a process of friction in which these forces collide, and it emerges only in an unsettled state of becoming.

Aiko Tezuka imagines the city as a single body, and her work engages with the story of its making and unmaking, the constant cycle of destruction and construction through which the city comes into being. Ceremonial garments from state rituals, antique maps, shopping lists, nail art: through these layered images, extending from the architects of modernity to the everyday lives of people today, an unbroken chain of human making emerges.

If the making of the modern city is bound up with desires that reach vertically upward, Asako Fujikura’s work presents a vision of horizontality. Another entrance opens at the building’s portico, and through it appears an alternative, fictional metropolis governed by the external logic of sunlight.

Even on construction sites pursuing maximum efficiency, the Shinto groundbreaking ceremony remains indispensable. Drawn to such spiritual practices that survive into the present, Shiori Watanabe focuses on the ceramic vessels buried beneath Noh stages as acoustic resonators. Her work listens for echoes of voices that linger in the deep strata of the city and the nation, suppressed during their formation yet never wholly silenced.

The artists’ imaginations introduce subtle and singular details into the pristine space of the new headquarters, inviting us to picture the city beyond the limits of rationality and standardised value systems. When we do, a passage opens onto the deeper inherent richness of the world, dense with accumulated memory, chance, and unforeseeable futures. All the while, these works remind us that everything is in a constant state of becoming, and that no place can ever be controlled or possessed.

—Tomoko Yabumae

Artists：Aiko Tezuka, Asako Fujikura, Shiori Watanabe

Curator：Tomoko Yabumae

Information

Dates: June 1, 2026 - November 30, 2027
Hours: 7:00 am - 11:00 pm (Open daily except January 1)
Admission: Free
Organized by: Toda Corporation
Sponsored by: Kawashima Selkon Textiles Co., Ltd.
HP Japan Inc.
Related site: https://www.apk.todabuilding.com/en/program/public-art-program-vol2/