TOKYO — At the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, a standing-room-only crowd watches the unfolding of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s “TIME TIME” (2024). The shadow of a woman playing a shō, a classical Japanese reed instrument, slowly creeps across the three screens on the wall, her image reflected in a glassy pool of water on the floor. The room is so full I can barely move.
Such is the power of the late Sakamoto to draw a crowd in Japan. He sold millions of records as part of Yellow Magic Orchestra and became the first in the nation to win the Oscar for Best Original Score. Even two years after his death, his face still adorns magazine covers. Seeing Sound, Hearing Time, somehow the artist’s first comprehensive exhibition in Japan, reverently, coherently, and poignantly examines his persona and themes across decades — no small feat considering most of the pieces are collaborations with other artists — though a couple pairings feel less than compatible.
Cinema, a form of art in which time is malleable and dreams made manifest, certainly informs the composer’s career as a media artist, and several works in Seeing Sound seem to approach these themes in ways that enhance or move beyond the filmic medium. Another Takatani collaboration, “LIFE—fluid, invisible, inaudible…” (2007), for instance, projects scenes from science, nature, and history, such as the famous footage of J. Robert Oppenheimer discussing the Trinity test, through a grid of fog-filled, plexiglas water tanks, suggesting the hazy, nonlinear associativeness of dream logic.
In one room, films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul play on adjacent screens: “Durmiente” (2021) comprises unused footage from the director’s feature Memoria (2021) showing Tilda Swinton’s character sleeping, while “async–first light” (2017) pairs Sakamoto’s “Life, Life” with video Weerasethakul shot of everyday life. The fuzzy, Inland Empire-esque lo-fi texture of the digital images makes it appear as if “async–first light” is the dream of the sleeping Swinton, speaking to the way our subconscious minds reorient us.
In other pieces, the composer’s presence is felt more deeply, like a yūrei haunting the halls. “async–volume” (2023) embeds a series of iPhones and iPads into the walls like tiny windows, offering us glimpses into Sakamoto’s home studio. In “Music Plays Images X Images Play Music” (1996–97/2024) we encounter the musician as a ghostly green holographic projection playing the piano, derived from video recording of an actual performance. Notes radiate from the piano like Guitar Hero gems, shifting shape with crescendos and diminuendos. One room features 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 thought of his first encounter with the instrument, captured in the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017), in which he tests it out in the destroyed high school from which it was recovered. The date of my visit, coincidentally, occurred on the anniversary of the cataclysmic event, enhancing the feeling that Sakamoto’s spirit was in the room with us, sitting at the piano.
Not all of the works, however, cohere. Carsten Nicolai’s film “ENDO EXO” (2024), featuring footage of animal skeletons in European museums set to Sakamoto’s sorrowful final album of piano sketches, deploys the composer’s music in a way I felt was too shallow and maudlin. Nearby, however, a woman was driven to tears by the footage. Just as at the cinema, the experience of Seeing Sound, Hearing Time is not constrained to the screen, but instead a collective encounter that made this afterimage of a great artist feel all the more profound.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (4 Chome-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto City, Tokyo, Japan) through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Sachiko Namba, Tomoe Moriyama, and Mio Harada.
