Ryuichi Sakamoto @ Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo - "seeing sound, hearing time" Exhibition

Ryuichi Sakamoto 

seeing sound, hearing time 

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 

Through March 30, 2025 

Ryuichi Sakamoto 

seeing sound, hearing time – Exhibition Poster

Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

A composer and an artist, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (1952-2023) continuously paved the way for his era through his diverse and cutting-edge artistic activities. Since the 2000s, he devoted himself to creating three-dimensional sound installations in exhibition spaces, which he developed and realized in collaboration with various artists. Focusing entirely on large-scale installation works, this first comprehensive exhibition in Japan looks back on Sakamoto's pioneering, experimental creative artworks, including some of his most well-known previous pieces, and new works that he envisioned for this particular occasion before his passing, which are dynamically constructed in and around the museum building.

Ryuichi Sakamoto was born in Tokyo in 1952. Making his debut in 1978 with the album Thousand Knives, Sakamoto's diverse résumé includes pioneering electronic works in the legendary techno group Yellow Magic Orchestra, producing pop albums and numerous classical compositions, two operas, and nearly 45 original film/TV scores. His film soundtracks have won prestigious awards, including an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, a Grammy, and many more. As an activist for many decades, Sakamoto's efforts focused on environmental conservation and world peace, including founding the forest preservation organization “more trees”, and the "Tohoku Youth Orchestra" to support the victims of the Tohoku Earthquake through music. Ryuichi Sakamoto also made considerable contributions to the art world with his work exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. Recently, M WOODS, in China, presented the largest and most comprehensive collection spanning 30 years devoted to Sakamoto's artworks in various media, centering around 8 large-scale sound installations (Beijing, 2021; Cheng-du, 2023). He continued to cross borders into the art world even after death, with the ground-breaking mixed reality concert piece, "KAGAMI," touring New York, Manchester, London, and many future locations. Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away in March 2023 at the age of 71.

Collaboration artists | Shiro Takatani, Daito Manabe, Carsten Nicolai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Zakkubalan, Toshio Iwai

Special collaboration | Fujiko Nakaya

Guest Curator: Sachiko Namba

Curator: Tomoe Moriyama (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

Assistant Curator: Mio Harada (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO

4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0022

www.mot-art-museum.jp

Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

December 21, 2024 - March 30, 2025

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Celebrates its Grand Reopening after Renovation with two Exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Celebrates its Grand Reopening after Renovation

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) will celebrate its Grand Reopening in late March 2019, almost three years after closing to upgrade its equipment and improve its utility as a museum building. The renovation is the first major rehab of the building since the museum’s inauguration in 1995. To mark the Grand Reopening, MOT will hold two concurrent exhibitions—one in its special exhibition galleries (3 floors) and one in its collection galleries (2 floors)—to thoroughly display its collection on a large scale in the entire space of the museum.

The collection of MOT consists of some 5,200 works in total. At its core are 3,000 pieces relocated to MOT, upon its opening in 1995, from Ueno’s Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, a home for exhibitions of contemporaneous art since 1926. An additional 2,200 pieces have been acquired by MOT. Distinguishing the collection are artworks of striking originality that captured attention in each era— works which looked in new directions and broke from conventional lineages of art history.

Through exhibits installed throughout the entire museum, this Grand Reopening presentation will comprehensively re-examine the collection at MOT, whose scope extends from avant-garde works of the pre- and postwar years to contemporary works created in this century. To broadly inquire into MOT’ s significance as a museum that has examined the artistic endeavors of each successive era will be a valuable undertaking at a time when MOT is embarking anew.

The Special Exhibition will take new perspectives on MOT’s collection to substantiate the special character of its holdings—artworks acquired through exhibitions and investigative research, and archival materials held in the museum library. The MOT Collection exhibition, meanwhile, will focus on the collection’s most recent additions and feature works acquired in recent years.

Related Posts (the two concurrent exhibitions):

Weavers of Worlds: A Century of Flux in Japanese Modern / Contemporary Art

Pleased to meet you: New Acquisitions in recent years

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO

4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0022

www.mot-art-museum.jp

Pleased to meet you: New Acquisitions in recent years @ Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo - MOT Collection Exhibition

Pleased to meet you

New Acquisitions in recent years

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

29 March－16 June, 2019

Currently, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) holds some 5,400 pieces in its collection, which spans the modern and contemporary periods with a focus on art of the postwar years. MOT regularly features the works in "MOT Collection" exhibitions, choosing a different theme each term to show the diverse appeal of contemporary art, and contriving to enable viewing the same artwork from different perspectives.

Having newly acquired some 400 works during its three-year closure, the museum will focus on these new acquisitions in its "MOT Collection" exhibitions this year, to mark its Grand Reopening. In term one, the exhibition will spotlight works produced in the 2010s and also unveil earlier collected works that have undergone restoration. In MOT's newly renovated galleries, thus, people familiar with MOT's collection and those viewing it for the first time will be able to enjoy fresh encounters with each of the works.

Curators: MUTA Yukihide / NISHIKAWA Mihoko / FUJII Aki / CHINZEI Yoshimi 

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO

Collection Gallery 1F, 3F

4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0022

www.mot-art-museum.jp

Weavers of Worlds: A Century of Flux in Japanese Modern / Contemporary Art @ Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Weavers of Worlds

A Century of Flux in Japanese Modern / Contemporary Art 

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

29 March － 16 June, 2019

This exhibition will survey the Japanese art of the past 100 years, from the 1910s to 2010s, through works mainly in the museum's collection. Its aim to show how the artists, by taking a discerning critical perspective, have selected strands of already established and radically new styles and techniques, and woven their own distinctive worlds. From the 1920s era of KISHIDA Ryusei to the present day, artists in each generation have studied the issues specific to their time and created works that critically examine the "circumstances of Japanese art."

In its narrative on modern and contemporary Japanese art, the exhibition will not situate the artists in the context of a static view of history; instead it will look at the particular practice of the artist who, by selectively adopting elements, was able to arouse his subject. It will furthermore display artworks whose subject matter relates to the Kiba district where the museum is located, a community that has witnessed dramatic change these 100 years. By surveying the artistically important works that punctuate Japanese modern / contemporary art history, in galleries on all three of the museum's floors, the exhibition will profile the history of one hundred years.

Exhibition Highlights:

- For the first time, the entire special exhibition galleries on three floors will be devoted to displaying the powerfully experimental works of this museum, dating from 1910 to the present, from the perspective of their connection with the art of today.

- Japanese modern / contemporary art will be examined from the perspective of artists who selected among diverse art styles and techniques, old and new, to form a creative, critical relationship with society. From this, the path-breaking character of their artistic endeavor, taking as its subject their own predicament of creating art in Japan—a nation with a hybrid culture—will grow clear.

- Besides selected artworks, valuable archive materials from the pre-war era will also be presented from the museum’s collection, which has evolved with changing landscape of contemporary art. They will include magazines of the Sosaku-hanga ( “creative prints” ) art movement from the museum library.

Curators: SEKI Naoko / YABUMAE Tomoko

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO

Exhibition Gallery 3F, 1F, B2F

4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0022

www.mot-art-museum.jp