Roppongi hills is a massive urban development project with the Mori Tower at the center. This anchor tower houses the Mori Art Museum on the 52nd floor and today the two exhibitions featured were extraordinary. Today we are fortunate that the Mori Art Museum has two major exhibitions. The first is WORLD CLASSROOM. Since the 1990s, when the development of contemporary art began to be considered from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world, we have been seeing that contemporary art today goes far beyond the framework of arts and crafts and fine art in the school classroom. It is a composite field with connections to all subjects, including language and literature, mathematics, science, and social studies. In each of these disciplines, researchers are exploring the “unknowns” of the world, delving into history, and making new discoveries and inventions from the past to the future in order to enrich our perception of the world. The stance adopted by contemporary artists that seeks to go beyond our preconceptions in a creative way is also connected to this exploration of these unknowns. In this sense, the contemporary art museum is something akin to a “classroom of the world” where we can encounter and learn about these unknown worlds.

WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Mori Art Museum, is an attempt for us to encounter a world we have never seen or known from a wide variety of perspectives, using the subjects we learn at school as a gateway to contemporary art. Even though this exhibition is divided into such sections as “Language and Literature,” “Social Studies,” “Philosophy,” “Mathematics,” “Science,” “Music,” “Phys. Ed.,” and “Transdisciplinary,” each work, in fact, crosses over multiple subjects and domains. While over half of approximately 150 exhibited works will be drawn from the Mori Art Museum Collection for the first time ever, there will also be newly-commissioned artworks for this exhibition - altogether creating a “classroom of the world,” place of learning with works by 54 artists/artist groups. The second exhibition is a deep dive into the innovative Heatherwick Studio of London. The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, is proud to present Heatherwick Studio: Building Soulfulness from Friday, March 17 to Sunday, June 4, 2023, at Tokyo City View (indoor observation deck). Established in 1994 in London, Heatherwick Studio has undertaken innovative projects in many cities including New York, Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, evolving to become one of the most closely-watched design teams in the world. Founder Thomas Heatherwick (born 1970 in UK) recounts how he would often find himself moved during his childhood by the “soulfulness” of small things that were made by craftspeople and artisans. Can the sprawling buildings and urban spaces that make our cities and towns also be imbued with this soulfulness? This is a question that often forms the starting points for a project at Heatherwick Studio. Every design is rooted in a belief that even projects as large as a city can have a human-scale, while harnessing the energies of the natural world and memories contained within architecture into new designs. At the core of this approach is the creation of places for gathering, dialogue, recreation, and enjoyment, instead of the design of “hard” elements that so often characterize products and buildings. Even as the Studio studies the history of objects and places, researches a wide spectrum of materials, and pays homage to traditional craftsmanship, their spaces, which deploy the latest developments in engineering, are replete with innovative ideas that seem to have eluded everyone else. As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and we re-evaluate our relationship with both the built and the natural environments, Heatherwick Studio’s designs feel more evocative and relevant than ever.

This exhibition is the first one in Japan to showcase twenty-eight major projects of Heatherwick Studio.