IT IS IN YOSHINO, a quiet cedarwood-manufacturing town in the Kii Mountains about three hundred miles from Tokyo, that something within me quietly shifts and settles into equilibrium. I have been in Japan for two and a half days, overwhelmed with navigating Tokyo and the Shinkansen railway lines. I am arriving at Cedar House, a small A-frame structure designed by Japanese architect Go Hasegawa and made mostly of cedarwood and glass, directly on the banks of the Yoshino River in Nara Prefecture. A wall of windows faces the river, and already I can feel its energy. The water’s flow, the mountains, and the forest of cedar trees surrounding us almost seem to emit a vibration.
Cedar House is the site of an artist’s residence for the Tokyo-based gallery space Un, which I visited this past April at the peak of the cherry blossom season. Space Un was initiated and founded by Edna Dumas—a French Cameroonian who first lived in Japan as a university student in the 1990s—and cofounded by Japanese artist and actor Yuta Nakano. It is the only artistic platform in Tokyo with the mission of promoting and exhibiting contemporary art by artists from Africa and the African diaspora. When I first heard of the idea, it seemed like an unlikely alignment. But according to a 2024 article in the Japan Times, “Afro-Japanese” artistic expression is increasingly popular in Tokyo: Three concurrent exhibitions on the theme took place that year. Dumas already had felt a natural affinity between Japanese culture and her own West African heritage as far back as her student days in Japan, when she first dreamed of finding ways to foster African-Japanese cultural exchange. In 2024, in the realization of a decades-long vision, she founded space Un.
The program for artists and curators of African descent is split between the gallery space in Tokyo—also designed by Hasegawa—and the residence in Yoshino. Subtle architectural elements of Hasegawa’s design hint at the marriage of cultures: The gallery ceiling is made from hinoki cypress wood from Yoshino, and special lighting in the evening mimics the mood at night in many West African countries, including Dumas’s Cameroon. Space Un invites four residents each year to explore Japan’s rich heritage and search for common ground and cultural sensibilities that may influence the work they make there. At the end of the residency, they are given the opportunity to exhibit at the gallery in Tokyo. These exhibitions are also invitations to the city’s residents to begin to see and imagine the possibilities of global connection through the arts.
Though new bridges are being built between Japanese and African arts and culture, it was difficult for me to find much easily accessible information about such connections in earlier historical periods. I did come across an amusing and intriguing nineteenth-century colored woodblock print by Japanese artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, who was born in Edo in 1839. The triptych, Tokugawa Shogun Viewing Watermelon Fight at Hama Palace, 1889, depicts two teams of boatmen in the water, competing to grab watermelons. The fruit is believed to have arrived in Japan in the fifteenth or sixteenth century along the Silk Road trade route from the African continent (although some accounts say it could have been introduced as early as the eighth century).
To see a nineteenth-century print featuring watermelons, which are said to have originated in Africa, testifies in some small and perhaps curious way to the influence of the continent on earlier Japanese artistic culture. We do have historical accounts of the first Africans being brought to Japan aboard Portuguese ships; it is left to our imagination to consider what cultural or artistic traditions came with them. In my research, I read about Africa Dojin no Geijutsu, published in 1925 and said to be the book that introduced sub-Saharan African art to Japan. But again, more information was difficult for me to find. I also discovered accounts of Japanese artist Toshi Yoshida, who began traveling to sub-Saharan Africa in 1973 and later made a series of woodblock prints of animals he had seen while there. His father, the artist Hiroshi Yoshida, had traveled to North Africa between 1903 and 1907. Some of his later works also were said to have been inspired by his time on the continent.
For months before I visited, I had been intrigued by Dumas’s idea of opening a space for dialogue between the country of Japan and the continent of Africa. Given space Un’s short history, the gallery seems positioned to fill a gap in artistic cultural dialogue. Besides founder Dumas, space Un is run by a compact team: the Japanese curator Naoki Nakatani, who serves as the director of the gallery, and Seiko Mbako, the Japanese Cameroonian director of communications. Since opening last year, the gallery has hosted nine artists who have collaborated with local craftsmen, carpenters, ceramists, and photographers to create their work. Last summer, the artists-in-residence were Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper, whose creative practice, Stephen Burks Man Made, co-designed the US pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architectural Biennale. They worked with Kuba textile patterns from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and cedarwood from the Yoshino region to create artworks in dialogue with the religious traditions of Buddhism and Shintoism. The next scheduled resident is curator Ekow Eshun, who has been invited to organize a show at the gallery in November to showcase the work of emerging artists from the African continent and the diaspora.
Space Un’s exhibitions are invitations to Tokyo’s residents to begin to see and imagine the possibilities of global connection through the arts.
When I visited, space Un was hosting renowned Cameroonian multidisciplinary artist Barthélémy Toguo, whose work focuses primarily on issues of displacement, belonging, borders, and exile. In Yoshino, he was creating his own paintings as well as a series of ceramics with Osamu Morimoto, a seasoned Yoshino-based Japanese ceramist, for his exhibition “Beauty of Nature” at the Tokyo gallery. On my first day in Yoshino, Nakatani, the gallery director, took me and a visiting filmmaker, Felix von Boehm, to see Toguo, who was staying farther up the mountain in the home and larger studio space of a local Yoshino resident. It was dark when we set out, and as Nakatani maneuvered the small car along the narrow winding road, I could feel the river beside us. I was not surprised to learn later that visiting artists from Guadeloupe and Senegal have felt a resonance between this environment and their respective countries.
Inside the house, six of Toguo’s large canvases were laid flat and taped to the floor, still being worked on. They pictured Japanese deities of his own invention in vibrant colors holding scrolls, enrobed in long kimonos and standing amid streams of floating gold ribbons. It was like a delivery room where gods were being birthed. Before the artist joined us, I took a moment to examine the works, to try to identify where he had merged his own experiences in Cameroon and the wider world with these mythic Japanese figures. I gazed at each canvas, walking alongside them as I would walk alongside a small portion of the river. The colors were so bright and commanding that the paintings seemed to radiate energy; it was almost as though the figures might walk off the canvases. In a work titled Beauty of Nature 3, 2025, one of the deities is pictured underwater, sitting in a river. I was captivated by the brilliant blue painted koi fish and the gold painted ribbons that swirled through the water and around the figure.
After everyone settled into the room, I listened to Toguo tell von Boehm about wanting to paint Japanese gods of nature that reminded him of his own ancestral heritage in Cameroon, which similarly sees sacredness in the natural world. According to him, the ribbons are a way of weaving the natural world with these deities. Something within me affirmed it all: I, too, feel that the more-than-human natural world is replete with its own spiritual elements, even if I cannot fully explain how. I understood the way the river outside had spoken to him. It had already spoken to me after I’d been near it for a few hours, simply through the sense of reverence I felt toward its raging waters, while also feeling renewed and at home beside it.
Back in the car, winding down the mountain, I chatted with Nakatani about the idea of cultures meeting through artistic practice—the essence of what space Un is trying to foster. Clearly excited about the possibilities, he confessed that being Japanese and having lived and worked in other countries, he sometimes wondered what art from his country would look like in the future. So many people, he explained, travel to Japan (and likely also to countries in Africa) attempting to lay claim to the past—to highlight and focus on traditions and celebrate old craftsmanship and even ancient spirituality. At times it can seem that parts of the art world still cling to these past traditions. He mentioned how natural it is that visitors love the dyed clothes and textiles, the pottery and ceramics. But, he asked, “what does it mean to be Japanese or African [Nigerian, Senegalese] now, in addition to these expressions? And how does this show up in our own lives or in the art world?”
Nakatani’s questions are good and provocative ones. I do not have a definitive response, but I can’t help thinking that the answer, in part, lies in initiatives like space Un, which make space—both literal and metaphorical—for artistic practice, rumination, collaboration, and dialogue between creators from seemingly diverse traditions and heritages across countries and continents. In November, Kyoto is hosting the Art Collaboration Kyoto fair, in which twenty-nine Japan-based galleries will be paired in booths with twenty-nine international galleries to celebrate and highlight the work of artists from each country and culture. Space Un has invited the young Nigeria-based contemporary gallery Retro Africa to exhibit work in its booth. With these kinds of events, Japan and many African countries are trying to steer the contemporary art world in new directions, knowing that art has the power to establish new ways of seeing and being in the world and with one another, while still honoring the treasures of the past.
Enuma Okoro is a writer and curator. She created and writes the weekend column “The Art of Life” in the Financial Times.
