Celebrate three decades of groundbreaking art at the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025—a showcase of innovative visual storytelling. This year’s festival honors the Tokyo Photographic Art (TOP) Museum’s 30th anniversary with a new theme, “Docs: Images and Records”, which asks anew the question “What is a moving image?”.
At the heart of the 2025 festival is an exploration of the dual role of documents as both factual records and interpretative visual media. From the Lumière brothers’ pioneering Exiting the Factory (1895) to the omnipresent digital imagery of today, the festival reflects on how the lines between fact and artistic representation blur in the modern age.
Key Programs and Highlights
The three-floor indoor art space of TOP Museum houses the screenings, exhibitions, and commission projects of the festival. Open-air artworks showcased throughout Yebisu Garden Palace, meanwhile, engage with other works deeply connected to the theme.
The first floor hosts a curated selection of films, concerts, panel sessions, open discussions, and workshops. Moving up, the second-floor gallery focuses on pieces related to performance and the body, emphasizing the recording of time and exploring cultural diversity and archival practices. Meanwhile, the basement gallery features works that interrogate the interplay between images, myths, and language from the nineteenth century to the present, featuring works from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government collection.
For a deeper examination of the evolving concept of moving images, new works by four distinguished finalists from the festival’s Commission Project—Oda Kaori, Komori Haruka, Nagata Kosuke, and Makihara Eri—grace the stage in the third-floor exhibition gallery.
The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the TOP Museum (operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture), and Nikkei Inc., with support from J-WAVE 81.3 FM and sponsorship by the Corporate Membership of TOP.
Visitor Information
The festival runs from January 31 (Friday) to February 16 (Sunday), 2025, at the TOP Museum, Yebisu Garden Place, and affiliated local venues. Operating hours are 10am–8pm, with the final day closing at 6pm; last admission is 30 minutes before closing. Admission is free for most programs, though some screenings and events may require a fee. Please note that schedules and program details are subject to change, so visit the official festival website for the latest updates.
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Find out more about Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.
Joanna Ligon @ligon.joanna
I’m a Master’s student at Waseda University, majoring in Visual Culture and Film Studies. I write, read, and watch movies on the side—and when I’m not too busy, I’m either traveling or having a mental breakdown.
