A Museum That Lets Graffiti Breathe: ‘One More’ at WATARI-UM - OSGEMEOS + Barry McGee
Written by Elena Calderón Aláez
Published on January 27th, 2026
I go to Watari-um often. It’s one of those Tokyo institutions that feels alive in a very specific way: compact, fearless, and always in conversation with the city outside. It’s also the final stop of our Tokyo Graffiti Walking Tour, for a simple reason: it’s the perfect place to land after a day of looking at walls. You can decompress, you can talk, and crucially, you can leave with something tangible. The museum shop is one of the best spots in town for art books and printed memories, the kind that keep the energy of the street with you long after you’ve gone back home.
So when I heard about One More: the first-ever collaborative exhibition between OSGEMEOS and Barry McGee, I wasn’t just curious. I was genuinely excited. I’ve seen their murals across different cities around the world. Their styles are instantly recognizable, and yet they come from different worlds: different rhythms, different characters, different styles. Seeing them share the same space in Tokyo felt like a rare alignment of everything I love about graffiti: its humor, its rawness, its community, its ability to shift between the illegal and the institutional without losing its voice.
A show that feels like the whole graffiti universe under one roof.
As a curator, I’m always asking a quiet question when I walk into any exhibition that claims to be about graffiti or street culture: does it capture the world, or just the look? One More captures the world.
The museum frames the exhibition with a statement attributed to McGee: “You’re gonna reclaim the city.” It’s a line that hits harder in Tokyo than in most places, because reclaiming public space here is not an abstract concept. It’s a daily negotiation, and it’s often one-sided.
What I appreciate is that Watari-um doesn’t present graffiti as a “trend.” It presents it as a living language, one that can take the shape of murals, drawings, installations, performance, and video. The exhibition text even describes the project as something beyond an exhibition: a kind of reunion where the artists encounter a blank space and let improvisation happen naturally, like a band building a song in real time. That’s not just poetic writing, it’s exactly how graffiti works when it’s honest: one gesture answers another, and the wall becomes a conversation.
Part of what makes this exhibition so satisfying is how clearly both artists remain themselves.
OSGEMEOS bring their unmistakable figurative universe, dreamlike characters with that characteristic yellow skin tone, a playful emotional palette, and a visual storytelling that feels rooted in São Paulo’s street energy and hip hop culture.
Barry McGee, meanwhile, carries that Bay Area grammar: the handstyles, the street-worn humanity, the sense that a mural can be both beautiful and uncomfortable, both funny and sharp. And even as his work has entered major institutions, the museum reminds us that his graffiti identity “TWIST” still keeps his mind in the street and in community.
Their differences are not a problem to solve. They’re the reason the show works.
The magic of the collaboration: shared murals, shared characters
One of my favorite things in One More is watching their universes collide in the murals. How their signature characters can coexist and even merge into shared scenes without either artist disappearing.
There’s a very specific kind of joy in recognizing both voices at once. You feel the chemistry. You feel the trust. You feel that this isn’t a “collab” designed for marketing, it’s the visual result of a long relationship that started decades ago. The museum recounts that OSGEMEOS met Barry in 1993 during his residency in São Paulo, and that a lasting bond of friendship and creativity formed from that encounter.
That history matters, because it shows up on the walls as ease: not forced harmony, but real dialogue.
There are exhibitions about graffiti that are impeccable… and yet they feel incomplete: either they lean too far into “museum-friendly street art,” or they get stuck in documentary nostalgia, or they turn culture into aesthetics.
Here, the opposite happened to me. One More feels expansive because it includes layers that those of us who have spent years looking at (and defending) this language recognize: muralism, installation, drawing, objects, atmosphere, music, animation, outdoors, community. Watari-um itself says it explicitly: the project overflows categories and mixes languages (drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video art).
The Record Store: when graffiti tells its story through music
One of the best curatorial decisions of the project, and I say this with professional admiration, is introducing a Record Store as an installation. The press release explains that the artists build it “as if it were part of a city,” and that their work is closely tied to music, born from the energy of the street.
For me, that gesture is more than scenography: it’s a reminder that graffiti cannot be understood without its soundtrack (hip hop, punk, hardcore, electronic, samba-funk, whatever it is in each scene), and without its material culture (flyers, zines, tapes, album covers, collecting). The “record shop” puts you inside that genealogy without explaining it with wall text.
The Animation Room: immersive digital piece
The statement describes an animation room with four walls of LED panels and mirrored ceiling and floor, where the works float in a “gravity-free” state as if it were outer space.
I find it brilliant because it opens a direct bridge: from the wall to the moving image, from the painted character to the animated character, from spray to pixel, without it feeling like a “technological extra.”
The outside matters: “invading” Tokyo with a (legal) wall in front of the museum
I’ve always been fascinated by how certain museums understand that if you invite writers, you can’t ask them to stay still inside a white box.
In this case, the project includes an outdoor mural: a vacant lot/empty space in front of the museum where a large wall is built to show a collaborative piece with two throw-ups signed as “OsGemeos” and “Twist”, sending a message to people walking in the street.
And here is where my personal reading becomes more political: for me, what’s powerful is not just that there’s work outside. It’s that, somehow, the show manages to return graffiti to the place it belongs: public space, even if through the “legal” route.
Tokyo’s complicated relationship with murals, and the ones that vanish
I’ve written before about how Tokyo has, at times, erased murals in the name of “cleaning up” the city, especially around moments of global attention. One case that still sticks with me is an OSGEMEOS mural I remember being behind Manhattan Records, in a street that, at least within the local scene, felt legendary. When work like that disappears, it’s not only paint that’s lost; it’s evidence that the city once tolerated visual risk.
I’m sharing this here as a personal memory and a curatorial frustration: because it explains why exhibitions like One More matter so much. They are not just celebrations, they are counter-archives. They keep the lineage visible when the street gets scrubbed.
Here, the exhibition also feels like symbolic repair: it doesn’t replace what was erased, that doesn’t come back, but it does reopen the debate about who decides the city’s visuality. The fact that One More includes an outdoor gesture, visible from the street, is a way of putting the issue on the table: if the museum can “allow itself” a giant legal throw-up, why can’t the city allow itself more permanent legal walls?
I’m not saying this as a slogan; I’m saying it as a cultural proposal. Tokyo deserves more walls for artists of this caliber, not only when they come “invited,” but as part of a sustained urban policy.
It’s also important to mention that Tokyo’s larger institutions are increasingly acknowledging street art and graffiti as serious contemporary culture.
A clear example was MUCA: ICONS of Urban Art at Mori Arts Center Gallery, which explicitly listed Barry McGee and Os Gemeos among the “internationally renowned artists” included.
As a curator, I see this as both progress and a challenge: it’s good that these practices enter major institutions, but it should not replace the need for more legal walls and long-term public opportunities.
Another reason I love when artists like these come to Tokyo is that they often create a wider ripple, public pieces, satellite exhibitions, unexpected traces. For example, a large-scale mural project by Barry McGee in Tennozu connected to TENNOZ ART FESTIVAL, with the mural intended to remain as a permanent work. That kind of long-term public presence matters, because it lets the city keep something, not just host something.
A personal highlight: the opening talk, and meeting them
I also had the pleasure of attending the opening talk and meeting the artists in person. It sounds simple, but it changed the temperature of the exhibition for me. Graffiti is a culture of proximity, of being present when something is made, of understanding that the work comes from real people, real friendships, real risks.
Seeing them speak, seeing how naturally they relate to each other, reinforced what the museum says about the exhibition feeling like a reunion, something human first, institutional second.
Last chance: February 2026
One More runs until February 8, 2026, and that makes it the last chance to experience this collaboration in Tokyo. If you care about graffiti history and its future, don’t wait.
Elena Calderón Aláez is an independent researcher of Graffiti and Street Art and a flaneur nomad from Madrid. She graduated in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage from Complutense University of Madrid and is an active member of the group StreetArtConservators. She is part of the Street Art Cities community, and a member of an urban art & graffiti researchers group in Spain. She has been based in Tokyo since 2020 and is the Chief curator of TOTEMO street art NFT marketplace since 2021.