As the name of this exhibition Seeing Sound Hearing Time suggests, the survey offers audiences a series of unique multisensory spaces that open up and describe parts of the intangible world that were imperceptible to us before, through a blend of audio and visual languages.

For example, the work Is Your Time (2017), which is jointly created by Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani, displays a piano that was washed up on the shore after the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

The piano's journey from land to sea and back again is a reflection of the uncontrollable forces of nature and the way it shapes the environment. The artist believes that to some extent this force is also present in the instrument, and the piano has developed new tone and sound due to its exposure to nature.

One of the visitors, Rishi (alias), claims, the piano hidden in the flickering light reminds her of the classic line in the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, "there's a bonfire in the distance, burning for the long-awaited".

The audiovisual installation Life-fluid, invisible, inaudible ...(2007/2021), another work created in collaboration with Takatani, is one of the key exhibits. It's developed from deconstructing and recreating an opera named Life, which was created by Sakamoto in 1999.

By fusing technology, images and nature, it gives the audience the experience of walking through a Japanese garden, thus realizing "the intersection of sound and image".

Originally commissioned in 2007 by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, the work is originally formed by nine customized water tanks, but M Woods brings an expanded version consisting of 12 tanks. Floating in the air, each tank is presented as a mixture of sound, artificial smoke and video footage, and images from the opera are projected onto the gallery floor following a taxonomical system.

Async, the first solo album that Sakamoto released in the spring of 2017, is presented in the exhibition, highlighting the difference between "listening" to an album and "experiencing" it in space, as Sakamoto calls "installation music".

The exhibition wishes to provide a different way to understand the album, and more importantly, the chance to physically "enter" the music through a space designed by Sakamoto and collaborators.

The exhibition also includes outdoor installations that have been modified especially for the gallery, Sensing Streams (2014/2021). It's originally made in 2014 with Daito Manabe, a Japanese artist. This new version has been converted from its original format and integrated into the existing architecture of the gallery's rooftop. Also, Sakamoto's cinematic scores, including The Last Emperor plus a special set of photographic images by artist Basil Pao taken during the making of the film, and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.

"The exhibition reflects the world environment, natural disasters, human behavior. Sakamoto is so amazing, he said that music represents. I will always admire him, from the past to the future," comments Wang Jiayi, a 27-year-old independent musician.

"It is a great pleasure to be invited to exhibit almost all of my sound installations in China for the first time. Through my work, I hope people in China can enjoy the boundary between sound and noise, between sound and silence, and the interstices of sound and image," says Sakamoto.

The exhibition runs until Aug 8.

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