If your familiarity with Ryuichi Sakamoto is limited to his scores for films like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor, a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo this winter or spring may prove startling and satisfying in equal measure.
At ‘Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time’, on at the MOT until March 25 2025, the interdisciplinary segment of Sakamoto’s oeuvre takes on a monumental dimension by way of a multisensory experience that connects sound, space and time. Encouraging contemplation, lingering and meditation, the immersive retrospective offers an unparalleled opportunity to discover the artist’s sound installations and traces his experimental and pioneering journey through landmark pieces as well as previously unseen works conceived shortly before his untimely death in 2023.
Room-sized artworks explore Sakamoto’s concept of ‘installation music’, under which the artist and his collaborators designed environments for the public to experience sound in physical space. These three-dimensional experiences interact dynamically with the museum’s architecture and highlight Sakamoto’s understanding of technology as an essential tool for making sense of the world as a whole, including the relationship between humans and their environment.
An eclectic career – and a lingering influence
Born in Tokyo in 1952, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s passion for music began early, inspired by a home rich in art and literature. His love for Debussy and Bach expanded to embrace John Coltrane’s jazz and the rock of the Beatles, shaping his eclectic sensibilities. Through studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (today’s Tokyo University of the Arts) he deepened his understanding of Western classical traditions, laying the foundations for his revolutionary fusion of Eastern and Western sounds.
Sakamoto’s musical career took flight with his 1978 solo debut, Thousand Knives, a bold mix of electronic experiments and traditional Japanese music. As a co-founder of legendary synth trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), he revolutionised electronic music, blending Japanese and Western influences in a genre-defining sound. The rise of YMO coincided with Sakamoto’s desire to explore new fields, including film scoring – another venture he excelled in, winning an Oscar for 1987’s The Last Emperor.
Never one to rest on his laurels, Sakamoto expanded his creative reach further in subsequent decades. The tail end of his career brought about those three-dimensional sound installations, through which he redefined the possibilities of sound and space in collaboration with artists across disciplines.
An immersion into signature themes
Central to the MOT exhibition is Sakamoto’s exploration of time, a recurring theme in his work. For instance, ‘Time Time’ (2024), created with long-time partner in crime Shiro Takatani, questions the nature of time by way of a dreamlike soundscape inspired by Natsume Soseki’s short story collection Ten Nights of Dreams. Another highlight, ‘water state 1’ (2013), uses weather data to control falling water droplets in a pool, transforming the resulting ripples into sound and light.
The influence of Sakamoto’s critically acclaimed 2017 album async resonates throughout several installations. ‘Async-immersion tokyo’ (2024) features a massive LED wall where shifting landscapes morph into abstract lines, immersing visitors in a fusion of visuals and sound. Another outstanding work is ‘Life – fluid, invisible, inaudible...’ (2007/2021), which deconstructs Sakamoto’s opera Life (1999), blending technology, images and nature in a space inspired by a Japanese garden, with suspended water tanks projecting images and sounds.
One of the most striking installations, ‘Is Your Time’ (2017/2024), features a piano that survived the 2011 tsunami and whose sounds are generated using global seismic data. The piano, described by Sakamoto as ‘tuned by nature’, captures the uncontrollable forces of the earth, juxtaposing human fragility with the vast, unpredictable rhythms of the natural world.
The exhibition concludes with ‘Life-Well Tokyo, Fog Sculpture #47662’ (2024), a collaboration with Fujiko Nakaya, that transforms the garden below the museum into a dreamlike landscape of fog, light and sound.
Seeing sound, hearing time allows you to discover – or rediscover – the work of an artist who made a profound mark on his time. The exhibition is a fitting tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s commitment to exploring the boundaries between artistic disciplines and connecting us to our environment – a vision that continues to inspire and resonate around the world.
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