For decades, travelers have relied on dog-eared guidebooks to navigate the unknown, trusting curated lists of landmarks and dining tips to provide a comprehensive picture of a foreign destination. However, the latest installment of the Art Week Tokyo Video programme seeks to dismantle this trust. Through a series of moving image works titled Your Travel Guide To…, curator X Zhu-Nowell explores how travel guides are rarely neutral tools but are instead instruments that choreograph our movements and decide which parts of a landscape are worth seeing and which should remain invisible.
The exhibition features ten artists who examine geography through the lenses of labor, memory, and migration. One standout piece by Berlin-based artist Kandis Williams draws a provocative parallel between modern movement and The Green Book, the essential mid-century guide for Black Americans navigating the dangers of Jim Crow era travel. By filming her journey through South Korea, Williams links the two nations via shared histories of state violence and suppressed mourning, emphasizing that the ability to move freely across borders is fundamentally tied to power.
Other works shift the focus toward the claustrophobia of contemporary design. New York artist Ken Okiishi presents a series of Zoom calls featuring his personal trainer living in Denizen, a high-tech residential complex described as a smart-home hellscape. As viewers are led through this meticulously engineered environment, they witness the cracks forming in a corporate promise of frictionless living. It serves as a digital counterpart to the traditional guidebook, showing how managed spaces can feel just as restrictive as outdated maps.
From historical eighteenth-century manuals for wealthy Europeans to today’s polished Instagram feeds created by nomadic influencers, Zhu-Nowell argues that every iteration of travel guidance carries an inherent bias. By bringing together voices from Japan and its diaspora alongside international contributors, Art Week Tokyo transforms the concept of the guidebook into a critique of how we perceive others. The result is a poignant reminder that geography is never truly neutral and that some of the most important stories about a place are those intentionally left off the map.
