Hara Museum of Contemporary Art

The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art was one of Japan's first museums dedicated solely to contemporary art, operating from 1979 to 2021. The building in Shinagawa, formerly the Hara industrial family's villa, was built in 1938 by Watanabe Jin in a Bauhaus-adjacent style, already an architectural rarity in Tokyo. Director Hara Toshio curated decades of works by Nam June Paik, Yves Klein and Yoko Ono. The house closed its doors at the old villa in late 2020 and was demolished in 2021; the collection moved to the satellite Hara Museum ARC in Gunma. Visitors to Shinagawa will no longer find the original site, a key pilgrimage point of Japanese avant-garde is history.