The Meet Your Art Festival 2024, billed as “NEW ERA,” transformed the Tennozu Isle area into a four-day cultural hub from October 11–14, bringing contemporary art into direct conversation with music, fashion, food and lifestyle programming. The festival centered on Warehouse TERRADA and expanded across the canal area, aiming to create unexpected encounters between established artists, galleries and a broad public audience.
Organizers framed this edition as a deliberately interdisciplinary project: beyond curated exhibitions, the program included two art fairs, a market of more than 80 stalls, live performances, talks and a specially commissioned shipboard performance. The festival’s architects emphasized accessibility and crossover appeal—inviting fashion labels, independent galleries and music acts to share space with painting, sculpture and installation work so that visitors could move fluidly from gallery booths to live stages.
The October 11 press preview — a soft opening before public hours — offered a concentrated look at the event’s curatorial logic. VIP walkthroughs highlighted the festival’s two principal art fairs, MEET YOUR ARTISTS and CROSSOVER, where more than 40 artists and roughly 15 cross-sector exhibitors respectively presented work that deliberately blurred disciplinary lines. Galleries and makers showcased everything from intimate prints and zines to ambitious installation pieces that responded to the canal setting.
Public programming was designed to sustain attention across the full weekend: a flagship line-up of live acts and talks ran alongside the fairs, while the TOKYO ART MARKET gathered independent vendors and specialty food stalls into a bustling marketplace. Major partners and cultural collaborators, including retail and creative hubs, staged pop-up venues and experimental storefronts in the WHAT CAFE and outdoor market areas, reinforcing the festival’s goal of making art feel embedded in everyday life rather than confined to white cubes.
Several venues within the Tennozu cluster extended hours for the festival and partnered on site-specific projects. Warehouse TERRADA served as the festival’s anchor, hosting gallery shows and late-night programming and coordinating with nearby institutions to create a continuous visitor route along the water. This site-based approach allowed curators and artists to play with the canal’s architecture, bringing light, reflection and movement into works that responded to place as much as to concept.
For international and local audiences alike, Meet Your Art Festival 2024 positioned itself as a model for contemporary cultural festivals in Tokyo: commercially ambitious yet publicly minded, rooted in collaboration between private venues and municipal initiatives. The result was a weekend that felt both like a fair and a neighborhood takeover—one where emerging talent could rub shoulders with established artists and visitors could discover art through food, music and experiential programming rather than by appointment alone.
Official links
Festival site (Avex): https://avex.jp/meetyourart/festival/
Event news (Avex English): https://avex.jp/en/meetyourart/festival/news/detail.php?id=1547
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