"Your Time" Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani
"Induction Stream 2021 - Invisible, Unheard" Ryuichi Sakamoto + Real Pot Generosity
"Life - Flow, Invisible, Unheard..." Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani
◎ Liu Ting
Some people say that there are only two kinds of people in the world, one is one who loves Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the other is one who does not know Ryuichi Sakamoto. I just don't know the one that Ryuichi Sakamoto has.
I don't know Ryuichi Sakamoto
The first time I heard Ryuichi Sakamoto's name was in Faye Wong's song "If You're Fake", when Faye Wong sang "If you are Mary or Julie Charlie or Ryuichi Sakamoto, it doesn't matter a lot." At that time, I thought this was a multitude of beings like Mary and Julie Charlie. Until I heard a Japanese song "Beauty の青空" in the music software, I was momentarily shocked on the spot, and hurriedly put down everything in my hand to check the music details, under the title it was written "Oruko Osaka / Ryuichi Sakamoto", this famous musician still did not give up on me, and finally let me become the first kind of person.
Even though I fell in love with Ryuichi Sakamoto's music, I was still an outsider and didn't even know why his fans called him "Professor." Ryuichi Sakamoto was talking with music, and I listened to it, and it was enough.
When I heard that Ryuichi Sakamoto was about to have an exhibition in China, I was curious, what will be on display at his "Kannon Listening" sound installation exhibition at the Muki Museum of Art? The introduction to the exhibition "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Kannon Listening" and the biography of Ryuichi Sakamoto himself were written too much, so I, who was habitually unprepared before the exhibition, was like a blank piece of paper, and I plunged into the exhibition.
Sing the piano
In the deepest part of a nearly completely dark space, there is a piano illuminated by extremely dim lights. I don't know when there was an art tour group, the tour leader introduced, this is a piano that was washed into the sea and washed ashore after the Japanese tsunami in 2011. The crowd exclaimed—how could it be so weird? It's pretty creepy. Then the LED screens distributed on the left and right of the dark space with different orders of snowflake dots suddenly lit up, making some irregular sounds. The space gradually began to shine, the tour group disappeared, and the piano seemed to make some playing sounds.
I think of the musician In One Piece, Brooke, who always sang a song called "The Wine of the Binks", which he and his friends of the Rumba Pirates played together on their deathbed. Brooke, who ate the "Yellow Spring Fruit", played this song alone on the ship for 50 years after the death of his friends... For a moment, I was in a trance, not knowing whether the lively bustle just now had really existed. Or like Brooke's constant flashback memories, just an illusion seen with the sound of the piano.
Cartoons always give us a lot of hope, such as Brooke to fulfill the last wishes of his friends so that he will not die; for example, the whale Rab waited for them for 50 years for a pact; for example, the lonely Brooke finally waited for Luffy to invite him to continue the adventure. What if it's in reality? The exploding-headed musician will die with his friends after completing the final ensemble, leaving the immortal piano, swept away by the waves, and then sent back to shore by the waves, just like the "tsunami piano" in front of us. It returned to the shore in a lost pitch, and was treated tenderly by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who said that the sound that had lost its pitch was a restoration from nature—"The waves came up in an instant, returning the piano to its natural state, and the sound of the piano tuned by nature, I felt particularly beautiful." ”
A thunderstorm in front of Grandma's house
The exhibition line is arranged, and after saying goodbye to the "tsunami piano", it is inevitable to come to the space where 12 water tanks are hung. Smoke drifted from the tank, images projected from above the glassware, rippled on the ground by the refraction of fog and water, and the colors were constantly changing, and some words alternated in the projections of different colors. Many people stand under the water tank to take pictures, take pictures of their faces being reflected sparkling, but also take pictures of their own shadows in those projections, I learned their angles to try it, the effect is not as good as the teamlab scene, because the light in the exhibition hall is not enough, so the photos taken are black.
There are some lazy sofas on both sides of the exhibition hall, which were thought to be just a place for the audience to rest, and they did not want to sit down to really enter the exhibition - the sense of immersion and oppression brought by the works. When I was a child, I liked to watch "Thunderstorm", at that time I did not understand the love and hatred of adults, nor did I understand the repressed social reality, but simply liked the weather described in the work, because every such thunderstorm season, it would make the hot and sweltering summer refreshing and transparent, this kind of weather often occurred in the afternoon, sweating from the nap, sitting on the bamboo chair in front of grandma's house to eat watermelon, sometimes you can drink a bottle of steaming orange soda, grandma while fanning me, while looking at the dark clouds in the sky said, It's going to rain heavily soon. The words did not fall, the raindrops smashed on the ground in large pieces, the dry ground smelled of dirt, the sound of rain and thunder instantly masked all the sounds, we sat under the small eaves to watch the rain, the rain became heavier and heavier, we were drenched by the splashing raindrops, and we hurriedly put away the small chairs and fans and ran home... After a long time, the thunderstorm stopped, the violin playing came and went, the sky transformed into a constellation cloud map, and the sonata in the 12 water tanks gradually slowed down, as if it was finally clear, refreshing and cool. I went back to tell my grandmother that the rain had finally stopped, but I found myself sitting alone on a lazy couch in the corner of the exhibition hall.
"Life-Flow, Invisible, Unseen..." is the name of this work, and I think the title is not accurate, because in the exhibition hall I really feel the visible and audible "Life-Flow". The so-called artistic dreams are nothing more than that!
Top floor fog
After experiencing a thunderstorm, as if the souls were left in the exhibition hall, the walking dead walked to a room full of screens, 8 screens connected to each other, and the sound of cutting wood moved from the right ear to the front and then to the left ear, and then repeated the action to the right. A certain metal percussion in the temple brings a repetitive chord, and the color lines on the screen gradually become physical objects. Finally, a piano performance appeared. The physical object returns to the abstract line again, as if it has undergone a dissipation. The faces of every spectator in the exhibition hall were filled with sublime expressions, and I still missed the thunderstorm.
Walk through the "door of Grandma's house" to a space full of Zen, a stone, a pool of raindrops on one side, and some slightly sharp sounds like ultrasonic waves. The mind is still in the thunderstorm, but the mechanism of the body adapts to this environment. It may be that the psychological expectations of the work are gradually formed, so the heart can no longer be moved. But when the sound of the sharp metal pressed against the whole space like a ball of cotton, the temperament of the whole space suddenly changed, becoming a fantasy place where you could sleep and listen to the rain pillow stones. The rain is falling again, more and more...
Later, I encountered some seemingly static but actually dynamic pictures on different sizes of screens, and the corners of those interiors seemed to be trapped in that beautiful moment and could not be changed anymore, and the audience peeked into their most beautiful moments. At that moment I felt lonely, a lonely little universe that could only talk to myself, and my senses were reactivated once by what I had seen and thought before. With this sense of loneliness, I walked to the final chapter of the exhibition - the top floor, the fog.
When they first reached the top floor, a sudden burst of fog came out of the ground, and the beautiful audience rushed into the fog in an instant, and the photographer next to them dutifully recorded the moment for them. Everyone's mood to watch this exhibition will be different, right?! You can imagine those beautiful viewers sending out photos of them like fairies on the circle of friends and ins. I could only walk to the other side of the fog. The thick water mist separated me from the people who recorded beauty, and the fog was thick and the scene was just right. The mist of water gushed up from the ground, wetting my clothes, face, and hair, and I returned to reality through those dreams without looking back.
Before leaving, I saw the audience's guestbook to Ryuichi Sakamoto - "I don't know how many years I can live in the future, but my heart is still carrying, so in order not to leave regrets, I want to create more works that can be done." 'Just like you!' One viewer wrote something like this. I also want to say, "Same as you. "The reason why the so-called genius is rare may be to give up the joy of one's own life, in order to bring the audience an experience that cannot be grasped and found in an instant."
Beijing in May, a big dream. Courtesy photo/Mumu Art Museum