Yamakawa Riku | Aki Sasamoto: Laboratory
A review of Aki Sasamoto's exhibition "Laboratory" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, exploring the viewer's positioning and the difficulty of experiencing performance.Summary
This review by Riku Yamakawa covers the traveling exhibition of Aki Sasamoto's solo show "Laboratory" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (July 19–November 3, 2026), which the author viewed on October 18, 2026. Having experienced the same exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo a year earlier, including the performance "Spirits' 3rd Power," Yamakawa reflects on Sasamoto's practice in which mathematical formulas, graphs, and diagrams emerge through mixed media—text, speech, drawings, and objects of various materials—so that small everyday questions expand to world-covering scale before suddenly collapsing. The author argues that Sasamoto's exhibition is simultaneously a performance stage, a partial materialization of phenomena, and a text readable only by Sasamoto herself. Unlike the "immersion" claimed by immersive theater, there is something that cannot be experienced by merely being in the room or by watching only Sasamoto; the space does not necessarily provide a position for the viewer. At the National Museum of Art, Osaka, visitors descend to the basement and follow a gently curving, yellow-lit corridor where the sound of the Sasamoto-absent "Wrong Happy Hour" drifts, before entering galleries where works are arranged in a large space with slightly interfering domains—extended pipes, springs, blue tarps, leaking sounds, and oversized video projections. The author imagines that, in Sasamoto's absence, one might move through the space similarly and overcome the alienation inherent in the work's structure, concluding with joy at having been able to visit again.
(Source：artscape)