On March 19, the largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date devoted to Japanese artist Ryuichi Sakamoto opened at M Woods art gallery in Beijing.

Earlier this year, on Jan 21, the 69-year-old Japanese artist released an open letter, confirming that he has been diagnosed with rectal cancer. This was a particularly harsh twist of fate as his throat cancer, diagnosed in 2014, went into remission after 6 years.

"From now on, I will be living alongside cancer," he wrote, "but, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer".

Born in 1952 in Tokyo, Sakamoto is a composer, singer, songwriter, record producer, activist and actor.

Almost all the roles he has played in his nearly 70 years are strongly related to sound, and such a career path is deeply influenced by his habit of intent listening.

The experience is vividly described on his website."When Ryuichi Sakamoto was in high school in Tokyo, he had to ride a commuter train to get to class. The passengers were always crammed in, with contorted torsos. Unable to move, all the teenage Sakamoto could do was listen. He amused himself by counting the sounds the train made, identifying more than 10 that he would listen out for every morning."

Sakamoto started playing the piano at 3 and wrote his first song in kindergarten. In 1970, he applied to study in the composition department of Tokyo University of the Arts and was accepted. During his study at the university, he was attracted by music, particularly the traditional music of Okinawa (an island in Japan), India and Africa, so he delved into ethnomusicology. He also studied classical music and came across electric music devices.

In 1978, he formed an electric music band named Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.

As the keyboard player and the songwriter, he helped drive the popularity of synthesizer-pop and pave the way for the study of classical impressionism.

He has also written a multimedia opera and turned US architect Philip Johnson's Glass House house into a musical instrument. He achieved this by sweeping rubber mallets over contact microphones on the surface to create a piece, not surprisingly, called Glass.

Sakamoto has scored more than 30 films, including Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) produced by Nagisa Oshima's, The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky created by Bernardo Bertolucci, Alejandro Gonalez Inarritu's The Revenant, and most recently, Andrew Levitas' Minamata. He has collected an Academy Award, a Grammy, a BAFTA, and two Golden Globe Awards.

This is the artist's first institutional solo show in China. It presents eight large-scale works and sound installations.

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