Ryuichi Sakamoto
ART-ENVIRONMENT-LIFE
November 1, 2013–March 2, 2014
Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM)
7-7 Nakazono-cho, Yamaguchi
7530075 Japan
Hours: Wednesday–Monday 10am–7pm
Admission free
The exhibition ART-ENVIRONMENT-LIFE by musician Ryuichi Sakamoto is being held at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. The exhibition introduces three installations, LIFE – fluid, invisible, inaudible… Ver.2, Forest Symphony, and water state 1, realized in collaboration between Sakamoto, artist Shiro Takatani, and the YCAM InterLab team.
In LIFE – fluid, invisible, inaudible… Ver.2, sounds coupled with visual projections onto fog open up the visitor’s perception of the environment. For this installation, Sakamoto de-/recomposed the opera LIFE (1999), in which he summarized the 20th century as an age of conflict and disruption, and proposed visions of coexistence for the 21st century.
Suspended from the venue’s ceiling are nine water tanks filled with artificial fog, which serves as a screen for successive projections of visuals used in the opera. The piece further incorporates sounds raining down on the audience in concert with the ever-changing imagery, in complex interactions of repeated synchronization and variance.
For Forest Symphony, the YCAM InterLab team developed a sensor device for measuring the bioelectric potential of trees, and collecting the measured data on a server via network. The device is installed on trees at different locations around the globe to measure their respective bioelectric data, which Sakamoto used to creates sounds that envelop the venue along with visuals made under the direction of Shiro Takatani, visualising the changing biopotential and information of the respective environments the device is installed in. These elements are spatially integrated into a “forest-like environment” in the form of a sound installation that continuously transforms in response to seasonal and climatic changes.
In water state 1, the newest piece, new spatial environments are created from the complex state variations of water. Ryuichi Sakamoto has been expressing his fascination with water for a long time, but at the same time also emphasizes the difficulty he has always felt when choosing water as a motif for his work. The YCAM InterLab team eventually developed a device that can be used to let large amounts of water rain down in droplets, which allowed Sakamoto to work with actual water rather than depicting its different appearances in an indirect manner. The device is used in this work to cause complex transformations of droplets and water surfaces, and at once translate these into sounds. The harmonic and contrasting aspects of the work’s visual and acoustic elements call forth a wealth of memories in the viewer’s mind.
Each of these works reflects Sakamoto’s particular awareness of issues related to “ART,” “ENVIRONMENT,” and “LIFE,” and evokes chains of thoughts from the past into the future while causing subtle fluctuations of the viewer’s inner sensitivity.
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Born in 1952, currently lives in New York. He made his debut in 1978 with the album Thousand Knives. Sakamoto’s diverse résumé include his pioneering electronic works, classical scores including an opera, and being a founding member of electronic music as a part of Yellow Magic Orchestra. His film soundtracks have won many prestigious awards such as an Academy Award for the Last Emperor (1987), two Golden Globes, a Grammy and a British Academy Award in addition to the several Japanese awards for his most famous film score, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Since 3/11 in Japan, Sakamoto has been a strong voice for support and help for the victims of the earthquake and the anthropogenic nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. In response, Sakamoto has launched the following three charity organizations: kizunaworld, LIFE311 and School Music Revival.
