On March 19, the largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date devoted to Japanese artist Ryuichi Sakamoto opened at M Woods art gallery in Beijing.
Earlier this year, on Jan 21, the 69-year-old Japanese artist released an open letter, confirming that he has been diagnosed with rectal cancer. This was a particularly harsh twist of fate as his throat cancer, diagnosed in 2014, went into remission after 6 years.
"From now on, I will be living alongside cancer," he wrote, "but, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer".
Born in 1952 in Tokyo, Sakamoto is a composer, singer, songwriter, record producer, activist and actor.
Almost all the roles he has played in his nearly 70 years are strongly related to sound, and such a career path is deeply influenced by his habit of intent listening.
The experience is vividly described on his website."When Ryuichi Sakamoto was in high school in Tokyo, he had to ride a commuter train to get to class. The passengers were always crammed in, with contorted torsos. Unable to move, all the teenage Sakamoto could do was listen. He amused himself by counting the sounds the train made, identifying more than 10 that he would listen out for every morning."
Sakamoto started playing the piano at 3 and wrote his first song in kindergarten. In 1970, he applied to study in the composition department of Tokyo University of the Arts and was accepted. During his study at the university, he was attracted by music, particularly the traditional music of Okinawa (an island in Japan), India and Africa, so he delved into ethnomusicology. He also studied classical music and came across electric music devices.
In 1978, he formed an electric music band named Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.
As the keyboard player and the songwriter, he helped drive the popularity of synthesizer-pop and pave the way for the study of classical impressionism.
He has also written a multimedia opera and turned US architect Philip Johnson's Glass House house into a musical instrument. He achieved this by sweeping rubber mallets over contact microphones on the surface to create a piece, not surprisingly, called Glass.
Sakamoto has scored more than 30 films, including Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) produced by Nagisa Oshima's, The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky created by Bernardo Bertolucci, Alejandro Gonalez Inarritu's The Revenant, and most recently, Andrew Levitas' Minamata. He has collected an Academy Award, a Grammy, a BAFTA, and two Golden Globe Awards.
This is the artist's first institutional solo show in China. It presents eight large-scale works and sound installations.
As the name of this exhibition Seeing Sound Hearing Time suggests, the survey offers audiences a series of unique multisensory 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.
For example, the work Is Your Time (2017), which is jointly created by Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani, displays a piano that was washed up on the shore after the 2011 tsunami in Japan.
The piano's journey from land to sea and back again is a reflection of the uncontrollable forces of nature and the way it shapes the environment. The artist believes that to some extent this force is also present in the instrument, and the piano has developed new tone and sound due to its exposure to nature.
One of the visitors, Rishi (alias), claims, the piano hidden in the flickering light reminds her of the classic line in the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, "there's a bonfire in the distance, burning for the long-awaited".
The audiovisual installation Life-fluid, invisible, inaudible ...(2007/2021), another work created in collaboration with Takatani, is one of the key exhibits. It's developed from deconstructing and recreating an opera named Life, which was created by Sakamoto in 1999.
By fusing technology, images and nature, it gives the audience the experience of walking through a Japanese garden, thus realizing "the intersection of sound and image".
Originally commissioned in 2007 by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, the work is originally formed by nine customized water tanks, but M Woods brings an expanded version consisting of 12 tanks. Floating in the air, each tank is presented as a mixture of sound, artificial smoke and video footage, and images from the opera are projected onto the gallery floor following a taxonomical system.
Async, the first solo album that Sakamoto released in the spring of 2017, is presented in the exhibition, highlighting the difference between "listening" to an album and "experiencing" it in space, as Sakamoto calls "installation music".
The exhibition wishes to provide a different way to understand the album, and more importantly, the chance to physically "enter" the music through a space designed by Sakamoto and collaborators.
The exhibition also includes outdoor installations that have been modified especially for the gallery, Sensing Streams (2014/2021). It's originally made in 2014 with Daito Manabe, a Japanese artist. This new version has been converted from its original format and integrated into the existing architecture of the gallery's rooftop. Also, Sakamoto's cinematic scores, including The Last Emperor plus a special set of photographic images by artist Basil Pao taken during the making of the film, and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.
"The exhibition reflects the world environment, natural disasters, human behavior. Sakamoto is so amazing, he said that music represents. I will always admire him, from the past to the future," comments Wang Jiayi, a 27-year-old independent musician.
"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," says Sakamoto.
The exhibition runs until Aug 8.
