Most travellers going to Japan already know the route: Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, perhaps Kanazawa if they have done their homework, Naoshima if they are obsessed with architecture. In autumn 2026, Maebashi is making a strong case for joining that map.
From Mebuku to the Biennale
The first Maebashi Biennale grows out of Mebuku, the city-development vision formulated by Maebashi in 2016. The word carries the idea of budding, sprouting, and beginning to grow. Ten years later, the Biennale turns that civic idea into a cultural route through the city centre: art spots, architecture, public spaces, markets and existing buildings linked into a walkable experience.
The festival runs from 19 September to 20 December 2026, with around 70 artists and creators, more than 20 venues, and over 20 collaborative programmes with local makers and cultural groups. Its geography is deliberately tight: roughly 500 metres square across central Maebashi, moving through Arts Maebashi, Maebashi Galleria, Shiroiya Hotel, galleries, retail spaces, vacant buildings, arcade shopping streets and public spaces.
That compactness gives the Biennale its travel appeal. Maebashi is not offering the grand museum-island fantasy of cultural escape. It is offering a city in motion: a former silk-industry capital, the birthplace of poet Sakutaro Hagiwara, and now a place using architecture, art, and privately led redevelopment to reshape how it is seen.
Architecture With a Civic Job
The architectural story is central to Maebashi’s new image. Sou Fujimoto, one of Japan’s best-known contemporary architects internationally, designed Shiroiya Hotel, a project that reworked a long-established local hotel into a cultural landmark. Fujimoto’s work often plays with the boundary between building, landscape and human behaviour; in Maebashi, that language becomes part of the city’s redevelopment story rather than a self-contained architectural object.
Maebashi Galleria, designed by Akihisa Hirata, adds another contemporary address to the route. Together with Arts Maebashi, Shiroiya Hotel and the city’s older commercial fabric, these sites give the Biennale a clear physical language: new architecture placed among existing streets, vacant buildings, shopping arcades and public spaces.
For international travellers, this is where Maebashi becomes legible. The city is not trying to win attention through monumentality. It uses proximity, design, and cultural programming to make a compact urban centre worth walking slowly through.
Margiela, Kawamata, Ninagawa
The Biennale’s first edition brings names that carry well beyond Japan.
Martin Margiela, the Belgian founder of Maison Martin Margiela, will present a reconfigured version of his art exhibition at Arts Maebashi and Maebashi Galleria, after earlier presentations in Tokyo and Kyoto. Since leaving fashion in 2008, Margiela has worked across collage, painting, drawing, large-scale sculpture, assemblage and video. His practice, long interested in traces, bodies, absence, objects and use, fits naturally into a city festival concerned with memory and redevelopment.
Tadashi Kawamata will begin his Tree Hut Project with the zelkova tree in front of Arts Maebashi. Other tree huts, developed through citizen workshops, will appear in nearby public spaces. It is an elegant opening gesture for a Biennale built around growth: provisional architecture made in public, attached to ordinary trees, changing the way people look at familiar parts of the city.
Mika Ninagawa, working with the creative unit EiM, will present a new work connected to redevelopment. Her earlier Maebashi project placed vivid images of flowers, butterflies, fish and other small life forms inside a shuttered cabaret and the atrium of Shiroiya Hotel. The new commission keeps her close to the city’s central question: how urban renewal looks when it is treated as image, memory and living matter.
From 19 to 21 September, the opening weekend will bring Jim O’Rourke, Carl Stone, Christophe Charles and others into an abandoned building on Ginza Street, known for its gold ceramic-tile façade. The detail is almost too good: a building with a past life, a shiny skin, and a new role for three nights of sound, image and physical space.
Food as Art? Enters the City
For Chefluencer readers, the most charged part of the programme is Food as Art?, curated by Takefumi Hamada.
Hamada is one of the restaurant world’s most serious travellers. He has been ranked the No. 1 restaurant reviewer by OAD for consecutive years and has eaten across more than 120 countries and regions. His public roles also include serving as Japan Academy Chair for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and as a judge for Destination Restaurants. In Maebashi, that career becomes more than a list of meals collected across continents. It becomes a curatorial position.
The question behind Food as Art? is direct: can food enter the realm of contemporary art? Hamada is approaching it through chefs, architecture and place, with dining experiences planned in open-air spaces within buildings designed by architects, including Sou Fujimoto and Yuko Nagayama, and with Shiroiya Hotel and other venues as the base.
The first announced chefs are Rasmus Munk of Alchemist in Copenhagen and Yusuke Takada of La Cime in Osaka.
Rasmus Munk the Food as Art Pioneer
Munk arrives in Maebashi with an existing public argument behind him. Through Convergence, the Alchemist-led congress in Copenhagen, he has helped bring the question of gastronomy as art into a wider cultural conversation, connecting chefs, producers, students, artisans and the public around food, responsibility, creativity and cultural status.
At Alchemist, that argument already has a built form. The restaurant opened in its current form in 2019 and organises its menu around “impressions,” combining cooking with visual work, designed objects, sound, social themes, and a carefully managed sequence. Munk’s food can be beautiful, confrontational, technically exacting and deliberately uncomfortable. His work gives Food as Art? a chef who has spent years treating dinner as a complete cultural form rather than a luxury sequence of courses.
In Maebashi, the question shifts from Copenhagen to Gunma: how does that thinking manifest within a Japanese city festival shaped by architecture, redevelopment, and public space?
Yusuke Takada and La Cime’s Wider Sensibility
Yusuke Takada brings the Japanese anchor from La Cime, his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Osaka. Born and raised on Amami Oshima, he trained in France at restaurants including Taillevent and Le Meurice before returning to Japan and building one of Asia’s most distinctive culinary voices.
His cooking is grounded in French technique, but it draws from a wider field: island memory, Japanese ingredients, art, photography, music, aroma, temperature and texture. Takada’s dishes often feel composed with a photographer’s eye, not decorated for the camera, but arranged through proportion, surface, shadow and pause before flavour takes over.
At Maebashi, he gives Food as Art? a precise Japanese counterpoint. With Rasmus Munk, the question expands through sequence, environment and public debate. With Takada, it gathers inside the dish itself: memory, technique, image and sensation held in disciplined form.
Markets, Sound and Local Work
The wider programme keeps the Biennale rooted in the city.
The Maebashi Art Market, produced by MEET YOUR ART in partnership with Kazemachi Yuyake Marche, will bring art, food, fashion, and crafts to Maebashi Chuo-dori Shopping Street. Theatre director Takahiro Fujita, actor Izumi Aoyagi and musician Ikuko Harada will present koe oto note at the former Yasuda Bank Collateral Warehouse, a war-damage heritage site from the Maebashi Air Raid. HERALBONY will produce FUNclusion, a sensory workshop programme during Disabled Persons Week.
These projects connect the Biennale to shopping streets, public workshops, former buildings, wartime memory and local markets. They are also where the promise of Mebuku becomes practical: a city beginning again through people, buildings, routes and encounters rather than through a single landmark.
What to Watch Next
The next announcement to watch is the full release of Food as Art?, including the dining formats, participating venues, dates and separate ticket details. With Takefumi Hamada curating and Rasmus Munk and Yusuke Takada already confirmed, this is the part of the Biennale most likely to move quickly from cultural curiosity to booked-out pilgrimage.
Further details will be published through the official Maebashi Biennale 2026 website and ticketing channels, with passport tickets already available and selected programmes to follow separately. For travellers planning a trip to Japan in autumn 2026, this is the moment to keep Gunma on the map.
Event Information
Event: Maebashi Biennale 2026. Maebashi International Art Festival. Where good things grow.
Dates: 19 September to 20 December 2026
Location: Central Maebashi City, Gunma Prefecture, Japan
Tickets: Passport tickets from JPY 3,000 for general admission and JPY 2,000 for students. Selected programmes require separate tickets.