Ryuichi Sakamoto retrospective to open at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin will present “Ryuichi Sakamoto. seeing sound, hearing time” from 11 September 2026 to 23 May 2027, marking the first major European retrospective dedicated to the late Japanese composer, producer and artist.
Opening during Berlin Art Week, the exhibition will occupy around 1,500 square metres in the Rieckhallen and will bring together seven works in five large-scale installations, placing Sakamoto’s practice at the point where composition, film, performance, technology and visual art begin to alter each other’s grammar.
Here’s a glimpse of the Ryuichi Sakamoto retrospective that took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in 2024.
About Ryuichi Sakamoto
Born in Tokyo in 1952, Ryuichi Sakamoto entered the wider musical map with his 1978 solo debut “Thousand Knives” and, that same year, co-founded Yellow Magic Orchestra with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, a group whose influence on electronic pop, synth-based production, techno, hip-hop and game music still reads like a hidden operating system behind large parts of contemporary sound culture. His solo work moved restlessly between avant-pop, chamber music, ambient composition, electronic experimentation and piano-led minimalism, while albums such as “B-2 Unit,” “Neo Geo,” “Beauty,” “async” and the final “12” reveal an artist who treated sound as matter, climate and memory rather than as genre.
His film work brought that language to international cinema. Sakamoto scored Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” in which he starred alongside David Bowie, and later composed for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “Little Buddha,” as well as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant.” His awards included an Academy Award, a Grammy, a BAFTA and two Golden Globes, yet the significance of his film music lies beyond prestige: Sakamoto could compress political history, erotic tension, exile, landscape and private grief into themes whose elegance never softened their emotional pressure.
“Ryuichi Sakamoto, seeing sound, hearing time” focuses on Sakamoto’s later spatial and audiovisual practice, especially the three-dimensional sound environments he developed from the 2000s onwards with collaborators including Shiro Takatani, Carsten Nicolai and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Among the central works is “Is Your Time” from 2017, created with Shiro Takatani, in which a piano damaged by the 2011 tsunami becomes an acoustic object activated through real-time seismological data from earthquakes around the world. Further installations grow out of “async,” Sakamoto’s 2017 album shaped by fragility, decay, field recordings and the presence of mortality, while two films by Carsten Nicolai use music from “12,” the intimate sonic diary recorded by Sakamoto between 2021 and 2022.
The retrospective arrives in Berlin as part of the 30th anniversary programme of Hamburger Bahnhof, a museum whose history has long involved the friction between contemporary art, sound, performance and expanded media. Curated by Ingrid Buschmann of Hamburger Bahnhof together with Tokyo-based curator Sachiko Namba, the exhibition will be presented in cooperation with KAB Inc. / KAB America Inc. and Dumb Type Office Ltd.
For audiences connected to electronic, experimental and post-industrial music, Sakamoto’s work remains essential because it never reduced technology to surface or spectacle. His machines breathed, his pianos carried weather, his silences had architecture. This Berlin exhibition promises a rare encounter with an artist who understood sound as a way of measuring time, damage, tenderness and the invisible forces moving through bodies and rooms.
Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away at the age of 71 in March 2023 after succumbing to cancer after a years-long battle.
’12’, the last Ryuichi Sakamoto album (January 2023)
In January 2023 Side-Line presented Sakamoto’s last album, “12”, out via Milan Records. The 12 compositions were recorded by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Tokyo during his 2-year long fight with cancer throughout 2021-2022. The album, his 15th, was the first of new solo material since 2017. The album’s twelve tracks are titled and sequenced by the dates each were written, culminating in a diary-like collection of music that provides an intimate snapshot into this period of Sakamoto’s life.
Prior to the release of his album, Sakamoto debuted a special solo piano concert that was streamed online to over 60,000 viewers worldwide. His first live performance in two years, the concert was recorded at Tokyo’s renowned 509 Studio over a week and featured an hour of the composer playing new arrangements from his extensive repertoire and new album.
Watch “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” from the live-streamed “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano 2022” on Sunday, December 11, 2022.
Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.
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