More than half a century has now passed since Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs launched, in 1967, its Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists (Zaiken) funding young artists to study at relevant institutions overseas, with the aim of nurturing talent to sustain the Japanese arts sector into the future. In the domain of fine art, the “DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow” exhibition inaugurated in 1998 creates opportunities for these artists to showcase the outcomes of their studies abroad. The first ten of these exhibitions were held at the Seiji Togo Memorial Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art in Tokyo (from 2002 known as the Sompo Japan Seiji Togo Museum of Art, and from 2021 the Sompo Museum of Art), and the eleventh to the twenty-third as annual shows at the National Art Center, Tokyo, with additional stagings commencing along the way at local venues and online under the title of “DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow plus,” in an expansion of the DOMANI program.

The spread and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic has however affected the Zaiken study program and DOMANI exhibition in various ways, meaning that the latest DOMANI, the twenty-fourth, will not be the usual large-scale show at the National Art Center, Tokyo. Instead, this year sees us embarking on a regional rollout of the exhibition, something we have been exploring for some years now. To make this happen, we contacted regions and museums with connections to former Zaiken artists—their places of birth or residence, or the base for their activities—and received cooperation from five of these locations. Each place has an art school and/or a contemporary art-oriented museum, and thus an affinity with the Zaiken program and the DOMANI exhibition. Entrusting the actual design and content to these institutions, this year we offer a fresh schedule of exhibitions, workshops and more, bringing together the work of Zaiken artists from around 2000 to the present day. This includes a “DOMANI plus” series of small and medium-sized exhibitions based on the previous “DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow plus” program, and a special “and DOMANI” program linking DOMANI to exhibitions planned and run independently by the facilities in question. We hope these programs will give audiences in each location an insight into the Zaiken system and the art of some of those who have benefited from it, and encounters with some future Zaiken artists.

We also plan to collate the outcomes from these five venues into a catalog for publication at the end of the fiscal year, and take the opportunity as well to press on with some pending archival work. Photographs taken at previous DOMANI shows have already been posted on the DOMANI website, but we now plan to publish a record of all twenty-three previous DOMANI exhibitions.

With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, this will be rather an irregular year for the “DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow” exhibition, but rest assured that between art display and publishing initiatives, there are plenty of treats in store for lovers of cutting-edge art.