Photo by Kioku Keizou, courtesy the artist and Yamamoto Gendai

Erina Matsui's "Food Chain — Star Wars!" (2008). Since making a splash at the Gesai fair in 2004, the young painter has become one of Japan’s most sought-after artists.

Yayoi Kusama Hiroshi Sugimoto Mariko Mori Makoto Aida Chiho Aoshima Yoshitomo Nara Ai Yamaguchi Yoko Ono

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When the entrepreneurial Japanese artist Takashi Murakami founded Geisai, in 2002, as a biannual one-day art fair to promote younger artists working in his art-production company, Kaikai Kiki, it was hailed by some in the art world as a novel addition to the ever-expanding universe of art fairs. Others dismissed the event as a publicity stunt. But, seven years on, its impact is hard to dispute. You don’t have to be a Murakami fan to see that enabling hundreds of artists without dealers to represent themselves and offer works directly to collectors and the public is a great way of cultivating fresh talent.

Besides functioning as an important training ground, Murakami’s fair is at the center of a new surge in Japanese contemporary art, as I discovered during a recent visit to the country. While attending Geisai 11, where almost 1,200 young Japanese artists displayed their artwork to 10,000 visitors, I encountered an art scene so vibrant and generally inexpensive that it seemed ready possibly to supplant the growing segment of the Asian contemporary art market that has been spearheaded by India and China.

In some ways, an uptick in the Japanese art market was inevitable. The country has always produced — and exported — good artists. Before the past five years, most, if not all, the Asian artists showing in the top galleries in New York and London were Japanese. The same goes for the auction houses, where such names as Yayoi Kusama (see Artist Dossier), Mariko Mori, Yoshitomo Nara, Yoko Ono and Hiroshi Sugimoto have long featured in major contemporary-art sales. Eventually the art world will get tired of India and China and rediscover Japan all over again. What awaits them can only be hinted at here.

Who are the new young artists, and where can you find them? The painter Erina Matsui, who won the gold medal at Geisai in 2004 at age 20, now shows with Yamamoto Gendai, one of the three main galleries, along with Kodama and the Takahashi Collection, specializing in new art. She has since become one of the most sought-after young artists in Japan, commanding $5,000 to $15,000 for her paintings. These are mostly self-portraits that couple imaginary subjects, as exemplified in the 2008 Food Chain — Star Wars!, where creatures spew from the artist’s wide-open mouth into outer space.

The Tokyo gallery scene is increasingly diffuse. Kodama, Takahashi and Yamamoto Genda all settled early last year in the upscale, largely residential Shirokane area. Finding your way there can be difficult, but it’s worth seeking out. Serious collectors will find some terrific young artists in Shirokane.

Other dealers have headed farther afield in search of cheaper rents and better spaces. Several galleries that used to be in Roppongi, a central business district, have moved to various locations around the city. Ota Fine Arts has set up in Kachidoki, near Tokyo Bay. Magical Artroom is in Ebisu, an area close to Roppongi but less fashionable. Here it shares a building with a handful of other galleries, including Art Jam Contemporary and NADiff, an art shop and bookstore, which also has a small gallery space.

Another metro stop brings you to Mizuma Art Gallery, located in a run-down brick building near the Naka-Meguro station. Mizuma may be the most celebrated gallery specializing in emerging artists. Determined to maintain its adventurous image, Mizuma’s owners recently opened a second project space to showcase new and experimental talents such as Ai Yamaguchi, 31, who worked as an assistant at Kaikai Kiki and now creates her own paintings and sculptures. The works, often of adolescent girls rendered in a simplistic realism akin to that of children’s book illustrations — are voyeuristic, manipulative and melodramatic, but definitely alluring.

Like Erina Matsui and fellow Kaikai Kiki alumnus Chiho Aoshima, Yamaguchi is associated with what is affectionately called J-pop, a style of contemporary art weaving together iconic Japanese cultural references — anime, manga, Ukiyo-e — and the formal elements of Pop. It has evolved into a painterly convention whose now-familiar imagery consists of groups of naked teenage girls in fantasy spaces. At the extreme edge of the genre is Makoto Aida, 43. Aida makes superrealistic paintings and drawings of pretty girls inspired by manga cartoon imagery, but often having a sexual and violent undercurrent, with his virginal figures victims of perverse defilement. His most recent show at Mizuma was knee-deep in paintings and drawings of beautiful naked females with bloody, bandaged stumps for hands and feet and dog collars around their necks, priced from $3,000 for drawings to between $6,000 and $7,000 for paintings. The works’ cruelty can be offensive until you realize that they are not about beauty, nor beautiful in a conventional way, but about the way that beauty has been perverted in the pursuit of soulless pleasure — in this instance, pornography.