TOKYO — On the Museum of Modern Artwork Tokyo, a standing-room-only crowd watches the unfolding of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s “TIME TIME” (2024). The shadow of a girl enjoying a shō, a classical Japanese reed instrument, slowly creeps throughout the three screens on the wall, her picture mirrored in a glassy pool of water on the ground. The room is so full I can barely transfer.
Such is the ability of the late Sakamoto to attract a crowd in Japan. He bought thousands and thousands of information as a part of Yellow Magic Orchestra and have become the primary within the nation to win the Oscar for Finest Unique Rating. Even two years after his loss of life, his face nonetheless adorns journal covers. Seeing Sound, Listening to Time, by some means the artist’s first complete exhibition in Japan, reverently, coherently, and poignantly examines his persona and themes throughout many years — no small feat contemplating many of the items are collaborations with different artists — although a pair pairings really feel lower than suitable.
Cinema, a type of artwork wherein time is malleable and goals made manifest, definitely informs the composer’s profession as a media artist, and several other works in Seeing Sound appear to method these themes in ways in which improve or transfer past the filmic medium. One other Takatani collaboration, “LIFE—fluid, invisible, inaudible…” (2007), for example, initiatives scenes from science, nature, and historical past, such because the well-known footage of J. Robert Oppenheimer discussing the Trinity check, by means of a grid of fog-filled, plexiglas water tanks, suggesting the hazy, nonlinear associativeness of dream logic.
Set up view of Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, “async–immersion tokyo” (2024) (©2024 KAB Inc.; picture by Takeshi Asano)
In a single room, movies by Apichatpong Weerasethakul play on adjoining screens: “Durmiente” (2021) includes unused footage from the director’s function Memoria (2021) displaying Tilda Swinton’s character sleeping, whereas “async–first light” (2017) pairs Sakamoto’s “Life, Life” with video Weerasethakul shot of on a regular basis life. The fuzzy, Inland Empire-esque lo-fi texture of the digital pictures makes it seem as if “async–first light” is the dream of the sleeping Swinton, talking to the way in which our unconscious minds reorient us.
In different items, the composer’s presence is felt extra deeply, like a yūrei haunting the halls. “async–volume” (2023) embeds a sequence of iPhones and iPads into the partitions like tiny home windows, providing us glimpses into Sakamoto’s residence studio. In “Music Plays Images X Images Play Music” (1996–97/2024) we encounter the musician as a ghostly inexperienced holographic projection enjoying the piano, derived from video recording of an precise efficiency. Notes radiate from the piano like Guitar Hero gems, shifting form with crescendos and diminuendos. One room options the piano Sakamoto salvaged from the tsunami of March 11, 2011 that had been “tuned by nature.” A machine was rigged to play the piano’s keys at random intervals; I considered his first encounter with the instrument, captured within the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017), wherein he checks it out within the destroyed highschool from which it was recovered. The date of my go to, coincidentally, occurred on the anniversary of the cataclysmic occasion, enhancing the sensation that Sakamoto’s spirit was within the room with us, sitting on the piano.
Not the entire works, nevertheless, cohere. Carsten Nicolai’s movie “ENDO EXO” (2024), that includes footage of animal skeletons in European museums set to Sakamoto’s sorrowful closing album of piano sketches, deploys the composer’s music in a means I felt was too shallow and maudlin. Close by, nevertheless, a girl was pushed to tears by the footage. Simply as on the cinema, the expertise of Seeing Sound, Listening to Time will not be constrained to the display, however as a substitute a collective encounter that made this afterimage of a terrific artist really feel all of the extra profound.
Set up view of Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, “LIFE–fluid, invisible, inaudible…” (2007) (©2024 KAB Inc.; picture by Takeshi Asano)
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, “TIME TIME” (2024) (©2024 KAB Inc.; picture by Kazuo Fukunaga)
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Toshio Iwai, “Music Plays Images X Images Play Music” (1996–97/2024)
(©2024 KAB Inc.; picture by Ryuichi Maruo)
Min Tanaka, “Locus Focus” (2024), a part of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Fujiko Nakaya, and Shiro Takatani, “LIFE–WELL TOKYO, Fog Sculpture #47662” (2024) (picture by Itaru Hirama)
Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, listening to time continues on the Museum of Modern Artwork, Tokyo (4 Chome-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto Metropolis, Tokyo, Japan) by means of March 30. The exhibition was curated by Sachiko Namba, Tomoe Moriyama, and Mio Harada.
