Ryuichi Sakamoto: his final immersive sound work on display in Hong Kong

Three years after the passing of Ryūichi Sakamoto, the Japanese maestro's final immersive sound work takes centre stage in a major exhibition at Hong Kong's M+ museum. “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Seeing Sound, Hearing Time” is built around “async–immersion”, a sound installation conceived before his death and derived from “async“, the album the Japanese composer considered his most personal.

Made with videomaker Shiro Takatani, co-founder of the collective Dumb Type, the work develops research Sakamoto had already begun back in 1999 with the multimedia project "LIFE": a meditation on temporality as a non-linear flow, free of cause-and-effect relationships.

In “async–immersion”, sound and image unfold independently of one another. An eighteen-metre-long LED videowall displays constantly shifting images that coalesce into landscapes, dissolve into lines and reform, while the soundtrack weaves together field recordings and musical fragments. The result is a perceptual environment in which a parallel temporal axis emerges, built on the gap between the visual and the acoustic.

After Sakamoto's death in 2023, Takatani completed the installation by incorporating elements from the composer's New York studio – piano, books, percussion, personal objects – heightening its memorial dimension. First presented at Ambient Kyoto and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2024, the work arrived at M+ in February 2026, where it remains on view until 5 July.

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