In the Tokyo neighborhood of Otsuka, where old-school kissaten cafes and Showa-era storefronts coexist with Vietnamese noodle joints and penguin-themed gift shops, a stroll down the shotengai (shopping street) that stretches from the train station feels like walking through a time capsule tinged with global flavors. This makes it all the more unexpected, and oddly fitting, that the contemporary art gallery Misako & Rosen chose to plant roots here rather than in the city’s glossier enclaves like Roppongi or Aoyama.
Founded in 2006 by the married couple Misako and Jeffrey Rosen, the gallery deliberately resists the market-driven polish of international “white cube” institutions.
That has not stopped the Rosens, however, from rubbing shoulders with such organizations at Art Basel Paris, which the gallery will participate in for the second time this year from Friday to Sunday.
“Given that commitment to being connected to the world that we’re in and not being apart from it, or elitist, this neighborhood made perfect sense,” said Jeffrey, 48. “When you walk from the station, you walk down this shotengai. And we’re somehow connected to that.”
For Misako, 49, Otsuka is “a more interesting place for Tokyo people” — and for a contemporary art gallery. “We’re building this character with our gallery and we have all these places to eat and drink, not like Roppongi kind of fancy places, which is not so interesting for me,” she said.
The gallery is housed in a space that is modest in scale yet carefully proportioned and equipped with a large front door. “We didn’t want to have a space which proclaims itself to be a church, to be holy or to be pure,” Jeffrey said. “But we want the rigor of a beautiful space. So how do you achieve that? Well, this door is open to Otsuka. Right across the street from the gallery is a ramen shop.”
The gallery’s unusual setting is no accident; it is a direct extension of its owners’ backgrounds. They both came of age in the Tokyo art world at a time when younger artists and gallerists were beginning to push back against the institutional polish and market-first mentality of the previous generation.
Misako, a Tokyo native, started working with Tomio Koyama Gallery at just 19. Jeffrey, originally from Houston, moved to Japan in 2002 after a stint at Taka Ishii Gallery in Los Angeles. By the time they opened Misako & Rosen in 2006, their vision was clear: to build a space that reflected their lives, their community and a shifting aesthetic sensibility rooted in the everyday, not walled off from it.
A decade into running the gallery in 2016, a year that also marked the birth of their daughter, the couple moved their business into a new building designed by architect Akihisa Hirata and commissioned by Jeffrey’s former employer, the gallerist Taka Ishii, who owns the property. The move marked a personal and professional turning point. But instead of scaling up, they took an unexpected turn. “The old expectation is that you level up by going bigger,” Jeffrey said. “But our space contracted. It got smaller. But with the high ceilings, the possibilities for what we could show expanded.”
With high ceilings that allow for vertical experimentation (“one artist hung their work from the ceiling,” said Misako), the gallery has to work around some quirks: a concrete arch at the entrance of the exhibition space limits what can fit through the door. “I like this because it also keeps us humble,” said Jeffrey. “It’s like, sure, you can show a five-meter work, but you have to be really innovative or use your ingenuity to figure out how the heck to get it in and out of the space.”
And, as with everything else they do, Misako & Rosen will be attending Art Basel Paris in characteristically unconventional fashion: by sharing a booth as well as all expenses and sales 50/50 with the gallery LambdaLambdaLambda, located in Kosovo. The collaboration builds on relationships formed through a space they had once shared in Brussels, La Maison de Rendez-Vous, and reflects the gallery’s core belief that art does not need be competitive to be serious, nor exclusive to be global.
Misako & Rosen will present works by three artists that reflect their offbeat vibes.
One is Naotaka Hiro, a Japan-born painter living in Los Angeles. One of the five artists on the gallery’s initial roster, he will be presenting “Untitled (Entity),” a large 2025 painting on wood panel whose shapes and colors map his psychological states during the process of creation.
In an email, Hiro explained the thinking behind his process: “Each mark or trace is not a deliberate composition but the result of a physical negotiation between my body, the material and the space around it.”
Another artist is Hisachika Takahashi, who died earlier this year at 85. Born in Tokyo, he lived and worked in Europe and the United States from the 1960s onward, spending decades as Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant. Long overlooked, his own practice has recently re-emerged through renewed interest. “Part of the reason we’re presenting his work in Paris is a tribute,” Jeffrey said.
And there is Yuki Okumura, a Japanese conceptual artist based in Belgium who played a “key role,” Misako said, in rediscovering Takahashi’s work and “bringing his legacy back into public view” over the past decade through research.
Misako & Rosen will be presenting a newer work by Okumura: the 2024 project “136 Postcards to 136 Locations,” in which he mailed exhibition invitations out to every known location around the world bearing the same address as Cento, the Glasgow space that commissioned the piece. “The work represents — or perhaps reflects — human curiosity about how everything in the universe is interconnected, sometimes in the most unpredictable ways,” he said in an email.
The gallery’s booth at Art Basel Paris may be situated among some of the world’s most high-profile galleries, but its core belief remains simple: Art is not a competition. The phrase, originally spoken by the Dutch artist Daan van Golden, who died in 2017, has become a slogan for the gallery.
“Being situated in this neighborhood helps us live by that,” Jeffrey said. “This isn’t a competitive environment, and we don’t feel the need to compete with our colleagues in other parts of the city, either.”
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