Ryuichi Sakamoto︱seeing sound, hearing time

Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) was a composer, producer, and artist born in Tokyo. He released his debut solo album Thousand Knives and joined Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) in 1978. His work encompassed electronic and classical music, film scores, opera, and sound installation. From the 2000s onward, his interdisciplinary collaborations examined how sound could be experienced spatially, as well as its relationships with technology, nature, and time. He was also engaged with environmental and anti-nuclear issues.

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….

Born in 1976, Daito Manabe is an artist, programmer, and composer. He founded Rhizomatiks in 2006 and Studio Daito Manabe in 2022. His practice uses programming, sensors, and data to connect sound, moving image, the body, and space, examining the relationships between analogue and digital, and between the real and virtual. His collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sensing Streams, makes invisible electromagnetic signals perceptible through image and sound.

Born in Germany in 1965, Carsten Nicolai is a visual artist and musician who produces electronic music under the name Alva Noto. Using concepts such as grids, codes, errors, random structures, and self-organisation, he examines the relationships among sound, light, and space. Since 2002, he has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto across numerous albums and live performances. This exhibition presents PHOSPHENES and ENDO EXO, two works that emerged from Nicolai's long-standing fascination with Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Born in Bangkok in 1970 and currently based in Chiang Mai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a filmmaker and visual artist. His works often take northeastern Thailand as their setting, combining folktales, memories of place, and contemporary experience through nonlinear narratives that intertwine dreams, memory, and reality. He also works with video installation, performance, and virtual reality. This exhibition presents his collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, async–first light, alongside Durmiente.

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.

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.