A light festival in Tokyo later this month will feature 12 installations designed to visualise elements of the city that are rarely seen.
Tokyo Lights 2026, which runs from 23-31 May, will explore the city’s urban landscape, emotions and creativity through five themes:
‘Visible city’ expresses Tokyo through light, including the flow of the city, traffic, signs of human presence, and data.‘Visible nature’ presents installations that evoke the breath of nature and the subtle movements of life.‘Visible heart’ features artworks that project emotions, memories and lingering traces of feeling as light.‘Visible connection’ explores interfaces of light linking the city and nature, and people and the city.‘Visible imagination’ offers participatory and immersive expressions designed to stimulate creativity and inspiration.
Light Art Park will comprise 12 installations in Shinjuku Chuo Park that will depict ‘invisible Tokyo’.
Photo: R.o.R Festival and Ana Rojc
Luke Jerram’s GAIA, which is making its Japan debut, is a 7m-wide depiction of Earth. Produced using high-resolution NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, the work offers an immersive experience akin to viewing the planet from space.
Australian-based studio Beamhacker’s Embrace is a participatory installation that invites visitors to join hands with the human-shaped silhouettes arranged around the piece. As they do so, ripples of light spread outward in a chain reaction.
Liquid Universe: Sōbō Chūfu – An Unclassifiable Entomologia of the Luminous Swarm, by Japanese artist Yoichi Ochiai, brings together different forms of light found in nature and in the city –such as fireflies, bioluminescent organisms and LEDs – within a 4m pillar of light.
Amid imagery continuously generated by computational nature, the work invites visitors to reconsider the boundary between the natural and the artificial.
V_T ‘s Visible Tower installation, meanwhile, visualises the memories and everyday activities of people passing through the city as ‘memories of light’.
During the day, it reflects the surrounding urban landscape and its visitors like a mirror; at night, AI-generated collages of the city’s memories appear on an LED display.
V_T：YAMACHANG / Kenji Kohashi / Naoya Murayama
Tokyo Lights 2026 will also feature this year’s 1minute Projection Mapping Competition, which has been staged annually in Japan since 2012.
AloJapan.com