“It is a great pleasure to be invited to exhibit almost all of my sound installations in China for the first time. Through my work, I hope people in China can enjoy the boundary between sound and noise, between sound and silence, and the interstices of sound and image.”— Ryuichi Sakamoto
M WOODS is proud to present the largest and most comprehensive survey exhibition to date devoted to Japanese composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto. The exhibition is Sakamoto's first institutional solo show in China, and centres around eight key large-scale works and sound installations that redefine how we experience an album of music or an art exhibition, while proposing different ways of understanding the world through sound and technology.
Ryuichi Sakamoto believes that technology is the key to remaining aware of the world in its entirety. Since the late 1970s, he has played a key role in redefining the intersection between sound and art in Japan and internationally. From his cinematic scores, for which he was awarded both an Oscar and a Grammy in 1988, and his influence on the development of electronic music through the Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) to his current activist work on climate changes, Sakamoto continues to radically transform the way we think about creative practice and the potential of art and music.
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, IS YOUR TIME, 2017, Installation
Tsunami piano, Vorsetzer (player piano mechanism), 14ch audio, 10 LED video wall panels Commissioned by NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC]
Photo: Ryuichi Maruo-
Courtesy of NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC]
As the title of this exhibition suggests, the survey offers audiences a series of unique multi-sensory spaces that open up and describe parts of the intangible world that were imperceptible to us before, through a blend of audio and visual languages. Each gallery in the museum expands on Sakamoto's concept of 'installation music', in which the artist and his collaborators have designed environments for audiences to experience sound within a physical space as an ideal means of sharing music and sound.
One example is the work Is Your Time (2017), made in collaboration with Shiro Takatani, which incorporates a piano that was washed up on the shore after the tsunami from the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. For Sakamoto, this piano represents the uncontrollable forces of nature that have shaped and molded our environment, including this piano, along its journey from land to sea and back to land again. Sakamoto believes that these forces, to a degree, are also contained within the vessel of this instrument, and can therefore express new sounds and tones as a result of its exposure to the natural elements and this global event.
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible..., 2007/2021, Installation
24ch audio, 12 acrylic water tanks with ultrasonic fog generators and video projectors
Original Development: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
Original version (9 Water Tank Version): Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
Beijing version (12 Water Tank Version): Commissioned by M WOODS Museum
A majority of the materials in this installation have been modified from the original opera LIFE, which premiered in 1999.
Photo: Ryuichi Maruo (YCAM)
Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
At the centre of the exhibition is the complex audio-visual installation LIFE – fluid, invisible, inaudible… (2007/2021), also made with Shiro Takatani, highlighting an important point of departure for the artist into the expanded territory of experiential sound spaces. The work contains two important sub-currents: the breaking of the unilateral experience of opera, here achieved through the recreating and deconstructing of Sakamoto’s 1999 opera LIFE. And secondly, the integration of technology, image, and nature to achieve what Sakamoto calls the ‘the interstices of sound and image’, here configured by the experience of walking through a Japanese garden. Originally commissioned in 2007 by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), with nine custom made 'water tanks', here at M WOODS, the work will be shown through an expanded version consisting of twelve water tanks. These tanks are suspended in the air like image clouds. Each one produces an intricate mix of sound, artificial fog, and video clips – organized by a taxonomical system – that are projected onto the floor with images from Sakamoto’s original opera.
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, LIFE-WELL Installation, 2013, Installation
fog, 5ch audio, LED light, motorized mirror, camera
Original Development: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
Photo: Ryuichi Maruo (YCAM)
Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, water state 1, 2013, Installation
water basin with droplet device, 16ch audio, stone Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
Photo: Ryuichi Maruo (YCAM)
Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
In the spring of 2017, Sakamoto released his first solo album in eight years, async, and with it he re-contextualized the way he wanted to both listen to and experience an album. async takes a central role in the current exhibition, highlighting the difference between ‘listening’ to an album and ‘experiencing’ it in space, as Sakamoto calls ‘installation music’. This concept of a experiential sound space, using async as a type of medium or point of departure, alongside collaborators such as Zakkubalan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is further ex- plored in the series of async galleries in the exhibition: ‘a(chǎn)sync – first light’, ‘a(chǎn)sync – drown- ing’, and ‘a(chǎn)sync – volume’, which enable both a deeper understanding of the album and, importantly, the chance to physically ‘enter’ the music through a space designed by Sa- kamoto and his collaborators.
The exhibition also includes two outdoor site-specific installations that have been modified especially for M WOODS, located on our museum rooftop and ninth-floor rooftop. One of which is Sensing Streams (2014/2021), originally made in 2014 with Daito Manabe, this new version has been converted from its original format and integrated into the existing architecture of the rooftop. Also present will be two temple galleries that highlight Sakamoto's cinematic scores, including The Last Emperor (1987), accompanied by a special set of photographic images by artist Basil Pao taken during the making of the film, and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). Accompanied by an exhibition catalogue and a series of live events and programming, the exhibition 'seeing sound/hearing time' will provide a critical overview of Ryuichi Sakamoto's artistic practice.
About the artist:
Photo by zakkubalan ?2020 Kab Inc
Ryuichi Sakamoto has lived many musical lives in his nearly 70 years. As a member in Haruomi Hosono’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, he helped set the stage for synthpop. His solo experiments in fusing global genres and close studies of classical impressionism led to him scoring over 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, Alejandro González I?árritu’s The Revenant, and most recently Andrew Levitas’ Minamata. In the past 20 years alone, he’s written a multimedia opera, turned a glass building into an instrument, and travelled to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. That exploratory spirit runs through Sakamoto’s 2017 album, async, which paints an audio portrait of the passing of time informed by his recovery from throat cancer. “Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending,” said Sakamoto in early 2019. “What I want to make now is music freed from the constraints of time.”
About the exhibition:
Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time
Duration: 15 March, 2021—8 August, 2021
Venue: M WOODS HUTONG
With collaborative works by Shiro Takatani | Daito Manabe | Zakkubalan | Apichatpong We- erasethakul
Curated by Sachiko Namba, Victor Wang, Zhang Youdai
Courtesy of M WOODS and the artist.
For more info, please visit: https://www.mwoods.org/Ryuichi-Sakamoto-seeing-sound-hearing-time
