CARTON e.U.

Bridging Japan and the world through creativity — that is the line CARTON has followed since Tokyo, 2016, and it has not bent since Vienna, 2025. The company was born in Tokyo as a creative practice moving between galleries, artists, and audiences; it now operates from Vienna as well, one house with two cities, treating Japanese intellectual property not as licensed content to be distributed but as material for contemporary art — curated, staged, and given form for audiences it was never originally made to meet.

That single conviction runs through everything the company does, whichever shape the work happens to take. It arranges Japanese guest artists for Europe's leading popular culture conventions — DoKomi, FantasyBasel, Vienna Comic Con — carrying each appearance from invitation through to the stage itself. It presents at contemporary art fairs such as Art Market Budapest, placing Japanese visual practice inside the wider conversation of contemporary art rather than beside it. It produces concerts for GHIBURI official artists, extending its reach from the visual into the live and performed. And it runs an international artist residency, offering the slower, deeper counterpart to the compressed intensity of a convention weekend or a fair.

None of it moves without the quieter work beneath it — licensing negotiated directly with Japanese rights holders, EU VAT and OSS compliance, contracts written to hold across two legal systems at once. It is this labor, largely invisible, that lets the visible work — an exhibition, a concert, a residency, a booth — arrive as though it had always belonged where it landed.