Also new to Future, and to New York in general, is three-month-old Chelsea gallery GOCA by Garde, which currently specializes in contemporary Japanese output and brought multi-colored work by Aya Kawato and Yuta Okuda to its white-walled booth.
“Our key initiative right now is to bring Japanese art to an international market, and we were invited by Future’s leaders to participate in the fair this year,” Akinori “Aki” Okada, the gallery’s CEO and creative director, told me. “This fair is very unique.”
With regards to entering the American art market in such an unstable time, Okada said that the gallery is “taking things day-by-day.”
“We got our first shipment of work from our artists about a month ago, so we were ahead of curve in terms of the tariffs situation at least,” he explained. “We’ll see how things go …”