Design Festa Gallery is a free, two-building art space in the back streets of Ura-Harajuku, run by the organizers of the biannual Design Festa art fair at Tokyo Big Sight. Its fifty or so rooms rent to any artist who applies, with no selection, for a week at a time, which means illustrators, sculptors, photographers and textile makers at every level of career, from students hanging their first show to established manga artists trying something different.
The building, bristling with painted pipes and covered in graffiti, is the attraction from outside; inside, go room by room and expect the unexpected. It is the best free introduction to the hand-drawn, kawaii-adjacent side of Tokyo’s art scene, and ten minutes from Takeshita Street.
Tips
- Exhibitions change weekly, often daily; artists are usually in the room and happy to talk
- The two buildings are joined by a courtyard with an okonomiyaki restaurant and the pipe-covered facade everyone photographs
- Combine with the Ura-Harajuku lanes behind it, where most of the graffiti murals in the area are