Date: Saturday, October 31, 2026

Time: 14:00–16:10

Venue: Auditorium, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Speakers:

Sachiko Namba | Curator
Shiro Takatani | Artist
Albert Tholen | Artist, member of Zakkubalan

Moderators:

Yi-Wei Keng | Dramaturg, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying)

Escher Tsai | Creative Director of Dimension Plus

Schedule:

Notes:

• Admission: Registration for the public talk does not include admission to Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time. Visitors who wish to visit the exhibition must make a separate reservation for an admission time slot and follow TFAM’s admission and visitor policies.
• Online Registration: Opens at 10:00 on Tuesday, October 13 to 17:00 on Thursday, October 29, or until capacity is reached.
• Check-in & Waitlist: 13:30–13:55, Saturday, October 31. Seats will not be held for late arrivals. Reserved seats will be released to waitlisted visitors after 13:55.
• Interpretation: Simultaneous Mandarin-Japanese-English interpretation will be provided. Please present a valid ID (national ID card, driver’s licence, NHI card, or passport) at check-in to borrow an interpretation device. Limited availability; early arrival is recommended.
• Venue Rules: Audio and video recording, eating, and drinking are not permitted in the auditorium without prior permission from TFAM.
• Media Use: The event will be recorded. Attendance indicates consent to the non-commercial use of event recordings by TFAM for educational, promotional, research, and other non-commercial purposes.
• Updates: Event details are subject to change. Please refer to the TFAM website for the latest information.

Introduction:

Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time surveys the pioneering artistic practice of the late composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) from the 2000s onward. Internationally acclaimed as a musician, Sakamoto’s practice extended beyond music, crossing the boundaries of sound, image, light, and technology to expand the possibilities of contemporary sound, propose new ways of perceiving and listening to the world, and transform music through “Installation Music” into a spatial experience that can be seen and perceived. His practice also continued to explore artistic, technological, and social issues.

The exhibition features seven large-scale installations, presenting Sakamoto’s long-term collaborations with artists including Shiro Takatani, Daito Manabe, Carsten Nicolai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Zakkubalan. It also includes selected archival materials that trace Sakamoto’s reflections on life, the environment, technology, and “symbiosis,” as well as the development of his practice toward installation art. Audiences are invited to experience his artistic practice across music, sound, and visual culture.

The public talk will begin with curator Sachiko Namba introducing the curatorial concept and selected works. Artists Shiro Takatani and Albert Tholen, a member of the creative collective Zakkubalan, will then take part in artist talks, moderated respectively by Yi-Wei Keng, Dramaturg of the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying), and Escher Tsai, Creative Director of Dimension Plus. Through these conversations, they will explore the works and exhibition concepts in greater depth. A Q&A session will be held at the end of the event, giving audiences in Taiwan an opportunity to engage directly with the curator and artists.

About the curator:

Sachiko Namba

Sachiko Namba is a curator and Project Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Tokyo University of the Arts. She previously served as Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and as Program Director for Visual Arts at the Japan Foundation, and is the author of three books on curating contemporary art in Japan. Her most recent major project is the Ryuichi Sakamoto exhibition, which has toured internationally across Beijing, Chengdu, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and is currently traveling to Berlin and Taipei, where she serves as curator of the Taipei presentation.

About the artist:

Shiro Takatani

Born in 1963, Shiro Takatani is a visual artist and theatre director. He co-founded the artist collective Dumb Type in 1984. Working with moving image, photography, lighting, sound, and stage design, his practice spans installation and performance. In 1999, he served as visual director for Ryuichi Sakamoto’s opera LIFE, beginning their long-term collaboration. This exhibition presents their collaborative works water state 1, async–immersion, and LIFE–fluid, invisible, inaudible….

Zakkubalan

Zakkubalan is an artist collective based in New York and Tokyo. Its participating members in this exhibition are Neo Sora and Albert Tholen. In addition to producing films, they create installations and video works combining photography, moving image, and sound, exploring forms of perception beyond conventional cinematic narratives. Sora is a filmmaker, artist, and translator, while Tholen works in film production and editing. Together with Ryuichi Sakamoto, they created async–volume.

About the moderator:

Yi-Wei Keng

Currently a curator, dramaturg for the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, and assistant professor in the theatre department at both Taipei National University of the Arts and National Taiwan University of Arts. Keng served as the artistic director of the Taipei Arts Festival from 2012 to 2017, curator of the Taoyuan Iron Rose Festival from 2018 to 2023, curator of Between Earth and the Sky: The Spiritual State of Our Times at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum with Jo Hsiao in 2020, and curator of the Tainan Arts Festival from 2023 to 2024. He has also been honored with the Freundschaftsmedaille from the German Institute in Taipei, France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Goethe Medal from the Goethe-Institut. Keng is the author of Philosophy Division: Punching the Art World with 45 Inquiries, Reading in the Age of Fading Aura, 80 Keywords of Cultural Leadership, 32 Tips on How to Write a Good Story, Reading in Taipei: My Secret Corners, Robert Wilson, and The Renaissance of Movement: The Short History of Modern Mime among others; and the translator of Theatre and the City, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies, Peter Brook: The Empty Space, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, and others.

Escher Tsai

The founder of Hello World and Director of the new media art collective Dimension Plus. His practice spans new media art, art and technology, curation, production, and international exchange. He has led major cultural technology and immersive media initiatives in Taiwan and curated exhibitions including NTT Arts NOVA 2025, TTXC 2024: G.A.M.E., Hello, Human! at MoCA Taipei, Taoyuan Art and Technology Festival, LIVES at Jut Art Museum, and C-LAB Future Media Arts Festival.