Seeing sound, hearing time at M+ Hong Kong
Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time at M+ Museum in Hong Kong turns the gallery into a space for listening, looking, and slowing down. On view until July 5, 2026, the exhibition celebrates the late Japanese composer, producer, and multimedia artist through works that bring sound, image, and architecture together. Rather than presenting music as something heard from a distance, M+ invites visitors to experience Sakamoto’s world physically. Sound moves through the galleries, images shift across large screens, and time feels less like a straight line than something you can enter. At the heart of the exhibition is async–immersion from 2023, a site-specific collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani. The work reimagines Sakamoto’s 2017 album async as a surrounding environment. Multi-channel sound fills the space while an 18-metre LED wall shows dissolving, pixelated images drawn from Sakamoto’s New York studio. The sound and images do not line up perfectly. They run on separate loops, drifting beside each other rather than moving in sync. This makes the work feel like memory itself: fragmented, layered, and always shifting. Nothing explains everything. Instead, the viewer is left to sit with the atmosphere. The exhibition continues into the M+ Grand Stair, where moving-image works by Carsten Nicolai, including ENDO EXO and PHOSPHENES, are paired with music from Sakamoto’s final studio album, 12. Here, the museum’s architecture becomes part of the experience, carrying sound through open space. What makes seeing sound, hearing time so affecting is its quiet pace. There is no single path to follow and no simple timeline. Visitors are encouraged to pause, listen closely, and notice small changes in light, tone, and rhythm. In a city that rarely slows down, this exhibition offers a rare kind of stillness. It does not ask you only to look at art. It asks you to spend time inside it. Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time is on view at M+ Museum,…