Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Installed Music” Comes to Azabudai Hills This Week

One of Tokyo's most anticipated cultural exhibitions of late summer opens this Friday.

From August 28 through October 25, Azabudai Hills Gallery will host RYUICHI SAKAMOTO + SHIRO TAKATANI AMBIENT KYOTO – TOKYO, bringing the installation async – immersion to Tokyo for the first time.

The work combines music by Ryuichi Sakamoto with visuals by Shiro Takatani and three-dimensional sound reconstructed for the gallery by sound director ZAK.

At the center of the installation is an enormous 26.4-meter-wide screen.

The project is based on Sakamoto's 2017 album async and his idea of “installed music” — music treated not simply as something played through speakers, but as something positioned and experienced spatially.

That makes Azabudai Hills an interesting setting.

When the complex opened, much of the international attention focused on its architecture, luxury residences, offices and restaurants.

But large redevelopment projects in Tokyo are increasingly expected to provide something more than buildings.

They need culture.

Museums, galleries, public art, landscaping, restaurants and events help turn real estate developments into destinations.

Azabudai Hills already contains teamLab Borderless and the Azabudai Hills Gallery. Bringing Sakamoto's work into the complex reinforces the idea that contemporary Tokyo development is as much about creating experiences as creating physical space.

There is also something particularly fitting about experiencing Sakamoto in Tokyo this way.

He was an artist whose career continuously crossed boundaries: Japanese and international, electronic and acoustic, commercial and experimental, music and environmental activism.

Rather than presenting his work as a conventional retrospective, async – immersion asks visitors to enter it physically.

Sound, image, architecture and the movement of the audience become part of the work.

For visitors interested in understanding contemporary Tokyo, this may be more revealing than another observation deck.

Tokyo's identity is increasingly found at the intersection of architecture, technology, art and public space.

And few artists represent that intersection better than Ryuichi Sakamoto.