Art Week Tokyo asks what travel guides leave off the map

By Daniel Okafor

Ten artists—five from Japan and one from the Japanese diaspora—anchor Your Travel Guide To…, the moving-image programme at this year’s Art Week Tokyo. The count places the programme firmly in a Japanese context, but it does not settle its harder question: which places get mapped, and which remain outside the frame.

At the 1F Earth Garden of the SMBC East Tower, 1-3-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, AWT Video runs from 4 to 8 November, 10am to 6pm. Its single-channel works treat geography as a product of migration, memory, labour and ideas, rather than as neutral terrain.

What does a travel guide choreograph?

X Zhu-Nowell does not treat guidebooks first as a literary genre. The executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum describes their practical promise: landmarks, local customs, and places to eat, drink and sleep, packaged as necessary knowledge for visitors.

Generations of tourists have followed dog-eared lists across unfamiliar places. For Zhu-Nowell, their deeper function is bodily. A guide does not merely list a destination; it choreographs how people move through inhabited spaces and idealised landscapes, while deciding which locales merit a map in the first place.

The familiar guidebook therefore begins here under suspicion. A guide can make foreign places seem knowable and manageable, but selection turns that assurance into an instrument of exclusion. It functions like a selective road atlas, marking routes of access while leaving other journeys off the page.

Geography, in this account, has been shaped by who moves, who labours, who remembers and whose interests travel with the map. That makes every itinerary an argument about what matters, and for whom.

How does The Green Book become a guide to Korea?

Berlin-based Kandis Williams’s A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025) draws on Victor Hugo Green’s The Green Book, the guide for Black Americans during Jim Crow. Williams places a Black American artist in South Korea, framing the work around the claim that “the political reality that mobility equals power.”

Zhu-Nowell says Green’s guide listed restaurants, hotels, gas stations, soda shops and other businesses where Black travellers could expect service and face less risk of harassment or price gouging. Williams’s Korean journey links that history to shared musical aesthetics, histories of suppressed mourning, and experiences of militarisation and state violence.

Here the source material is specific and consequential: mobility carries unequal risk, and knowledge about safety can become a form of power. Yet the available description gives no detailed account of the film’s scenes, editing or soundtrack beyond its premise and the artist’s passage through Korea.

What happens inside the frictionless home?

New York-based Ken Okiishi’s Brian at Home (2020–25) consists of Zoom calls with the artist’s personal trainer, who lives in a New York City space called Denizen. Zhu-Nowell calls the film addictive and describes Denizen as a smart-home hellscape filled with app-based appliances and perks.

Okiishi walks viewers through a highly designed public-private space and towards the failure of its promise of frictionless inclusivity. Connected appliances, app-based perks and domestic choreography now organise access, making a guidebook’s instructions part of everyday life. That shift makes the work’s politics visible, although the announcement does not explain how the calls are edited or staged.

Who is making the work?

Zhu-Nowell has previously worked with four of the ten artists. Berlin-based Williams has never shown in Japan before, and the curator considers it important and meaningful to bring their work into this context alongside new companions.

The announcement also names Berlin- and Beijing-based He Xiangyu; Japan-based Linda Iha, Fuyuhiko Takata and Atsushi Yamamoto; and the late Keiichi Tanaami (1936–2024) and Hiroyuki Oki (1964–2025), both described as masters of handcrafted moving images.

The available description names eight of the ten participants, leaving two unlisted and providing no work titles for six of the named artists. That incompleteness matters less than the scale of the conceptual claim, but it makes a visit or fuller checklist essential before judging the programme’s full range.

What history does the guide carry?

Zhu-Nowell’s position is blunt: “travel guides are far from neutral forms, and often do a poor job of concealing that lack of neutrality.” She argues that every form reflects a long, complex history as a technology for mediating difference and as a storytelling device.

Her comparison stretches from 18th-century ars apodemica guides, which instructed wealthy European young men on the world tour how to observe, behave and listen to foreign others, to the pocket guides that proliferated at the end of the 20th century.

She treats the former as an entitled inverse of The Green Book: one advised European elites how to encounter difference; the other helped Black Americans avoid danger. Neither escaped the politics of choosing a route, a destination or a person fit to instruct.

Zhu-Nowell then points to today’s digitised, pocketable guides and the self-described nomadic class of travel-influencer globalists. For her, these are not tidy breaks with the past but another chapter in the same struggle over framing power, supporting philosopher Katherine McKittrick’s point that geography is never a neutral space.

That claim is forceful, and the programme’s range gives it a useful test. Yet exclusion can become an aesthetic reflex, and leaving the map may itself become a preferred style. The work will matter most if its images expose the mechanics of selection, protection and othering rather than merely announce their presence.

With the exhibition running through 8 November, and with guidebooks already migrating into digital and influencer culture, the programme points toward a necessary institutional question: who gets to draw the map, and what happens to those the frame leaves outside?