About Tokyo Art Club

The Tokyo Art Club was founded in 1907 and will soon celebrate its 120th anniversary. Members include not only those involved from the time the club was originally founded, but also art dealers who have continued for generations since the Edo period. The headquarters is located in Onarimon, where the mansion of Yagyū Tajima no Kami (a daimyo and master of swordsmanship for the Tokugawa shogunate) once stood.
The 12-story headquarters hosts daily auctions of various artworks, has a Japanese garden, tea ceremony room, and a Japanese-style room with 100 tatami mats that can accommodate large-scale tea ceremonies on the second floor, while the third and fourth floors contain halls with an area of 200 tsubo each (about 1,860 ㎡) for art fairs and exhibitions.
For members of the Tokyo Art Club, which has facilitated the distribution of art in Japan, an important part of their work is connoisseurship. An Edo period document refers to early art dealers as karamonoya (“sellers of foreign goods”) and defines them as those who possessed the skill of mekiki, or “having sharp eyes”, that allowed them to immediately assess the value of the items before them.
This is still an essential skill for art dealers, who must be able to determine market value as well as authenticity. It is a sign of professional credibility.

The Tokyo Bijutsu Seinenkai is active as a subsidiary organization of the Tokyo Bijutsu Dealers Cooperative Association, which organizes the Tokyo Bijutsu Club, in which only top-class art dealers are allowed to join.
Our youth members are made up of young employees under the age of 41 who work at companies and stores run by the approximately 500 members of the Tokyo Art Dealers Cooperative.
Our main activities include assisting with exchange events (auctions between vendors that only association members can participate in), tours to museums and art galleries, domestic and international study trips, social gatherings, and assisting with tea parties and "Daishikai" held at museums. and so on.
The ``Tea Ceremony Club'' is the only club activity of the Tokyo Bijutsu Seinenkai, and its members practice hard and play an active role in setting up tea ceremonies as part of the Seinenkai.
Tokyo Bijutsu Club's e-commerce art mall ``TSUNAGU Tobi'' was created in response to the recent shift to online art markets, and is a project launched at the initiative of the Youth Association. The youth association also handles the club's SNS, and strives to spread awareness of Tokyo Art Club events and union activities on a daily basis.
Since its establishment, it has become a valuable place where people from the same generation can interact with each other, transcending the specialized areas of each company, and form the foundations of being an art dealer and forming future human relationships.
Tokyo Art Club Youth