Generations of tourists have criss-crossed the world clutching dog-eared guide books. With lists of must-see landmarks, advice on local customs and listings of places to eat, drink and sleep, guide books promise to contain all that you could ever need to know about foreign places.
This year’s Art Week Tokyo (AWT) Video programme challenges that assumption, with a selection of single-channel moving image works that ask what is mapped, and what is left out of view.
“My interest in travel guides is less in them as a genre or style of literature,” says sector curator X Zhu-Nowell, “and more as a form that choreographs bodies within inhabited spaces, idealised landscapes, and any other kind of locale that has been deemed necessary to map out.” The showcase considers geography as shaped by migration, memory, labour and ideas.
Curator X Zhu-Nowell Photo by sokol
Of the ten artists showcased in Your Travel Guide To…, five are from Japan and one is from the Japanese diaspora. Zhu-Nowell, who is the executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, has worked with four of the artists previously, including Berlin-based Kandis Williams, who has never shown in Japan before. “It’s important and meaningful to bring their work in this context alongside new companions,” Zhu-Nowell says.
Connecting countries
Williams’s video A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025) draws upon Victor Hugo Green’s famous The Green Book guide for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era. “It identified restaurants, hotels, gas stations, soda shops and other businesses where Black travellers could expect to be served and were at less risk of harassment or price gouging,” says Zhu-Nowell. Williams reflects upon this history and frames the work around “the political reality that mobility equals power”. Showing the Black American artist moving through Korea connects the two countries’ shared “musical aesthetics, histories of suppressed mourning, and experiences of militarisation and state violence.”
Zhu-Nowell also highlights New York-based artist Ken Okiishi’s “addictive” video Brian at Home (2020-25), which consists of Zoom calls with the artist’s personal trainer, who lives in a “smart-home hellscape” in New York City called “Denizen” with “a seemingly endless array of app-based appliances and perks”. Okiishi walks the viewer through this “highly designed public/private space [to] watch its promise of frictionless inclusivity start to come apart”.
A still from Hiroyuki Oki’s Buddy Matsumae’s Picture Diary (1988) © Hiroyuki Oki, courtesy Anomaly, Image Forum and Okiiki
The exhibition also includes the Berlin- and Beijing-based He Xiangyu, while Linda Iha, Fuyuhiko Takata and Atsushi Yamamoto are based in Japan, as were the late Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024) and Hiroyuki Oki (1964-2025), both masters of handcrafted moving images. This range of perspectives combines for a nuanced exploration of how “travel guides are far from neutral forms, and often do a poor job of concealing that lack of neutrality”, Zhu-Nowell says. “Each form they take reflects the long and complex history these objects have as difference-mediating technologies and storytelling devices.”
The curator cites as an example the “the infamous 18th-century ars apodemica guides that instructed wealthy European young men on a ‘world tour’ how to observe, behave, and even listen to ‘others’ in foreign cultures”, an entitled inverse of The Green Book. “Those pocket travel guides that proliferated at the end of the 20th century are also fairly famous,” Zhu-Nowell says. “Today, new forms, digitised and even more pocketable, have emerged from a self-described ‘nomadic’ class of travel-influencer globalists. But in every case, the framing power of travel guides underlines [philosopher] Katherine McKittrick’s point about how geography is never a neutral space.”
• AWT Video, SMBC East Tower, 1F Earth Garden, 1-3-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, 4-8 November, 10am–6pm
