About the Festival

About the Festival

Founded in 2009, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is an annual event in Ebisu. Each year it presents a cross-disciplinary program—exhibitions, screenings, live performances, and talks. It serves as a forum for invigorating artistic practice in the moving image and for sharing—widely and openly—ways to nurture and sustain its media and forms. In recent years, the Festival has strengthened ties with local communities and expanded international networks; it continues to enrich and develop its programs.

About Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026

Rather than taking a narrow view of the moving image, the Festival keeps its focus wide, attending to the many possibilities around it and reconsidering the diversifying forms of moving-image practice and the ways it is received. The Festival continues to serve as a platform for fostering and sustaining the alternative visions that art and the moving image can generate. Each edition sets a theme to explore “What is the moving image?” and presents work from Japan and abroad, all amid shifting conditions and diversifying frameworks and technologies in the field.
For the 2026 edition, while continuing to question the roles of the moving image and photography, the Festival considers social change from a more open and responsive perspective. As a platform for a polyphony of voices and practices, the Festival introduces new programs in sound and theater alongside moving-image and photographic work. In the 3F exhibition gallery, a presentation featuring works by Komori Haruka—recipient of a Special Prize in the second Commission Project—and works from the Tokyo Museum Collection will be on view, in dialogue with the overarching theme of the Festival. By staging edition-specific juxtapositions, the Festival creates space for multiple perspectives.

This Year’s Theme
あなたの音に｜日花聲音｜Polyphonic Voices Bathed in Sunlight

Contemporary society upholds the value of diversity, and yet even where people, cultures, and languages seem to share affinities, misunderstandings and misreadings inevitably arise. Armed conflicts persist, structural inequalities remain unresolved, and the frictions of our time multiply without prospect of conclusion. We inhabit an unstable and intricately entangled social condition. The overarching theme of Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026 begins with Taiwanese language, introduced by the lead curator, Yu-Hsuan Chiu.
Taiwanese is a language that first spread orally, later shaped by phonetic symbols developed in the 19th century and by written forms using Chinese characters in the 20th century, producing a wide range of literature—including the Taiwanese (Formosa)–Japanese Dictionary, published in 1931. It shares many affinities with Japanese and continues to coexist with multiple systems of notation.
This Taiwanese phrase, composed of the words Jīt-hue¹ (日花) and Siann-im² (聲音), conjures an image of beams of light filtering between trees into a space alive with innumerable voices, none identical to another. Around us too, different voices move and intermingle, overlapping like an ensemble to form a resonant polyphony³. Guided by Taiwan’s language, itself layered with various cultural accumulations shaped by shifting historical currents, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026 seeks to gently illuminate the layered modalities of interaction through which diverse cultures and languages influence one another in contemporary society. Through photography, moving image, sound, and performance, thoughts and presences meet in intersection, resonating and overlapping, albeit sometimes dissonant, to unfold into an intricate visual and auditory polyphony. Individual voices and their states of being will not be effaced; rather, multiple perspectives will converge and expand together. Beyond the museum walls, through the myriad works you encounter within the multilayered spaces of Ebisu, we invite you to savor your own quiet reflections.

1. Sunlight filtering through clouds or through the spaces between trees (Taiwanese (Formosa)–Japanese Dictionary).
2. Voice, tone, sound, timbre.
3. A musical term denoting the coexistence of multiple independent melodies in harmony. In contemporary usage, the concept has been extended beyond music into philosophy, cultural theory, and other fields, where it describes an open structure that enables collective participation.

Event Overview

Title

Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026
あなたの音に｜日花聲音｜Polyphonic Voices Bathed in Sunlight

Period

February 6 (Friday) – February 23 (Monday, national holiday), 2026 [16 days]
Closed February 9 (Monday) and February 16 (Monday)
* 3rd floor gallery: February 6 (Friday) – March 22 (Sunday)

Hours

10:00–20:00 (February 6–22)
10:00–18:00 on the final day (February 23)
* 3rd floor gallery, February 25 (Wednesday) – March 22 (Sunday): 10:00–18:00 (open until 20:00 on Thursdays and Fridays)
* Last admission 30 minutes before closing

Venues

Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Yebisu Garden Place, and affiliated local facilities.

Admission

Free
* Admission will be charged for some programs, such as screenings.
* Please check the latest information on the official website.

Organized by

Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum operated by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, Nikkei Inc.

Co-organized by

SAPPORO REAL ESTATE CO., LTD, Fondation Maison franco-japonaise

Granted by

British Council

With assistance from

Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan Taiwan Culture Center, J-WAVE 81.3FM

Sponsored by

YEBISU BREWERY TOKYO, Corporate Membership of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

* Programs and schedules are subject to change.

Staff

Lead Curator

CHIU Yu-Hsuan

Curators

CHIU Yu-Hsuan, TASAKA Hiroko, YAMAZAKI Kaho, MITSUI Keishi

Educational Program

SHIMOKURA Kumi, SATO Mamiko, NAKANO Keiko, MATSUZAWA Yu

Accessibility

FUNANOKAWA Seiko, NAKANO Keiko

Operation Manager

NIWA Harumi

Public relations of Museum

SAKATA Megumi, KUSHIRO Akiko, IKEDA Ryoko

Coordinator

DOMAE Kaho

Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026 Executive Office

Avex Creator Agency Inc.

Production Management

KATO Shinsuke, KOGO Yuuri

Coordinators of Production

HORIE Yuya, MURATA Shiho, MORI Anna

Key Visual

TANAKA Seri

Editorial coordinators/proofreading

SAKURAI Hiroshi (Noch Books)

Translator

IKEDA Satoshi

Design of Printed Materials

TANAKA Seri, KOSAKA Ayano

Web Design

MAEDA Akinobu, SHONO Yusuke, TAKAHASHI Yu (MAEDA DESIGN LLC.)

Contact

General Inquiries

E-mail: info_yebizo@av.avex.co.jp
Official website: www.yebizo.com

Press Inquiries

For details regarding coverage of the festival
and publication inquiries (limited to members of the press/media), please contact us as below.

Yebizo2026 Office
E-mail: yebizo@av.avex.co.jp
Contact: MURATA Shiho / MORI Anna

1 Organization 2 Media Outlet Name 3 Publication Date/Time
Kindly fill in the requested details above and contact the designated Press contact.

The second press release is scheduled for mid-January, following the finalization of the details. Further details will be announced on this website.