“When I first read the book, I thought about how I make narratives or stories that’s based on improvisation. And, I wanted to expand that creativity into the world of objects who are autonomous in a way that I’m not making it. They are making up all the stories that I read into.” — Aki Sasamoto
Aki Sasamoto, “Weather Bar Forecast #2” (Video Still), 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo
Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980 in Yokohama, Japan; lives and works in New York, United States) is an artist who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and video. She is known for her installations utilizing found objects and the activation of installations through improvisational performances, from which Sasamoto explores the nuances and peculiarities of everyday life. Fables, anecdotes, and biographical elements often seep into Sasamoto’s works that explore relationships between body and space, engaging viewers on multiple sensory levels through a stream-of-consciousness interaction.
Performance view of “Aki Sasamoto: Strange Attractors”, Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, 2010 | Image courtesy of the artist, Take Ninagawa, Tokyo and ArtAsiaPacific
After completed her high school education at the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, United Kingdom in 1999, Sasamoto studied mathematics when she moved to the United States to pursue higher education. When she found her passion in art, she studied BA in dance and studio art from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 2004, and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2007. In the same year, she started to incorporate dialogue into her performative installations. Sasamoto is currently a Professor in Sculpture in Yale University, School of Art. She is also the co-founder of Culture Push, a non-profit interdisciplinary arts organization that brings people from different communities together to foster new modes of thinking and creating. Her institutional solo exhibitions include those at the Queens Museums, New York (2023-2024); The Kitchen, New York (2017), and Sculpture Centre, New York (2016). She has also participated widely in international exhibitions including the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); the Aichi Triennale (2022); the Busan Biennale (2022); the Okayama Art Summit (2022); the Shanghai Biennale (2016); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); Yokohama Triennale (2008), and among others.
The relationships among dance, improvisation and objects in her body of work
Sasamoto often performs inside her installations, which can take place in galleries, theatres, or outside of traditional art venues. She regards her work as dance rather than performance, using objects as a part of choreography. She also thinks that she is one person of the audience performing in her installation and as a way of interacting with the installation and of establishing a personal relationship to the objects. “I wouldn’t call it performance, I was really thinking dance. But in retrospect, I always had objects in my pieces. At the time, I was probably looking at them more as costumes or different materials to work on stage for inspiration… It was just the timing that made it that people were interested in performance in the visual art world. For instance, I was dancing in this alternative space and I noticed that it was talked about as performance rather than dance.”
Performance view of “Aki Sasamoto: Sounding Lines”, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024 | Image courtesy of the artist and Para Site
She is very interested in the variation in performing. “There is never a script, there is always the possibility that the work can change while I perform it: sometimes I’ll add or subtract what I’m saying. In the last few years I’ve been trying to repeat a work more often just so I can get deeper into it, with the hope that it will change. The changes may not even be drastic, a drastic difference I experienced only a couple of times.” Starting from the existing object and what it refers to, Sasamoto likes to push meaning with the wrong answers, which is like a game of misunderstanding and a lot of mistranslations come out as being poetic. “It drives me nuts, and I’d go away and really think about somebody turning into a pistachio or into walnuts, and wonder, what nuts are they talking about? Taking everything literally was already an extension of the poetic.”
Point Reflection
“Point Reflection” (Video) centers on Sasamoto’s installation “Sink or Float”, first presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and later on view as part of the solo exhibition, “Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection”, at the Queens Museum in 2023, which presented a selection of recent works and a new performance by the artist.
Aki Sasamoto, “Point Reflection” (Video Still), 2023 | Image courtesy of the artist and Sunpride Foundation
During the 59th Venice Biennale, Sasamoto’s constructed environment employs controlled chaos to transform the everyday into the fantastical, inviting the viewer to retune their perceptions of the seemingly mundane in everyday life.
Installation view of Aki Sasamoto, “Sink and Float”, the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022 | Images courtesy of the artist and La Biennale di Venezia
“My work is titled think of float and it’s a series of commercial sinks that I turned them into a floating device and I also brought in the commercial kitchen appliances that I turned them into like a box. I usually make a performance and installation that kind of are called dependent and for this show. I wanted to ask objects to do the performance for me and in a way that expresses like improvisational structure.”
Installation view of “Sink or Float” in the exhibition “Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection” at the Queens Museum, New York, 2023 | Image courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum, New York
In 2023, Point Reflection (Video) shared a title with a performance work and larger exhibition, staged at The Queens Museum, New York. The video work continues Sasamoto’s ongoing investigations into ideas of changes and phases, predictability and unpredictability in life.
Installation view of Point Reflection (video) in the exhibition “Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection” at the Queens Museum, New York, 2023 | Image courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum, New York
The title refers to a geometric condition that occurs when a figure is constructed around a single point known as the point of reflection. For every point in the figure, another point is found directly opposite to it on the other side. Under the point of reflection, the figure does not change its size and shape. As a contextual backdrop, this title lends a sense of mirroring and paralleling that underscores Sasamoto’s interest in ideas of yearning, ageing, probabilities and chance.
Installation view of “Sink or Float” (details) in the exhibition “Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection” at the Queens Museum, New York, 2023 | Image courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum, New York
Sasamoto turns to the metaphor of snail shell chirality—the direction in which the snail shell coils—to imagine the inverted horizon beyond the point reflection where all things are otherwise, but also still themselves, and asks, “When do you decide to go the other way?”