Ginza Goldfish Hyakka Exhibition

The Ginza Goldfish Hyakka Exhibition is the last special exhibition at Art Aquarium Museum Ginza, in the Ginza Mitsukoshi department store, before the museum closes its Ginza displays. Hyakka means "a hundred flowers". The exhibition brings together works made for the museum since it moved to Ginza in 2022, along with older pieces, in an autumn setting.

Art Aquarium presents tanks of goldfish as works of art, staged with light, scent and sound. It treats them as a modern form of goldfish viewing, a pastime that goes back to the Edo period. It began in Tokyo in 2007 as a series of temporary shows, opened its first permanent museum in Nihonbashi in 2020 and moved to Ginza in 2022. The organizers plan a new project for its 20th anniversary in 2027.

In Goldfish Stone Garden, from 2025, tanks shaped as blocks of water stand like the stones of a garden. Bamboo surrounds them in waves under green maple leaves. Kuma Kengo, who took part in making it, describes a large spiral of bamboo and acrylic at the center with three smaller spirals around it, answering the movement of the fish. In Goldfish Approach, columns of tanks set up like torii gates line a path of ginkgo and red spider lilies. Goldfish Corridor, produced by Hibiya-Kadan, is hung with wisteria, a flower said to ward off evil, over a floor of flowers in purple light. In the Goldfish Folding Screen Room, tanks in the shape of folding screens stand on a mirrored stage. Edo-period screen paintings and prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi are projected onto them, so the goldfish swim through scenes of old Edo.

Several works are built around Oiran, the large tank most associated with Art Aquarium, named after the oiran, the highest-ranking courtesans of the Edo period. It appears under cherry blossom in Cho-Oiran -Yui- and in neon light in NEO Oiran. In Hanamai, the flower artist Kariyazaki Shogo fills the space around the Oiran tanks with flowers.