Aki Sasamoto: Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is pleased to organize the exhibition Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory. This exhibition is the first mid-career retrospective for Aki Sasamoto (1980–), and provides an introduction to the New York–based Sasamoto’s oeuvre and explores how her themes and methods have evolved over two decades as a working artist.

From performance and dance to installations and video, Sasamoto combines and crosses media freely as her ideas demand. She is best known for improvisational performances inside custom-built spaces incorporating sculptures and devices she prepares herself. Her early works skillfully blended everyday gestures and acts with witty narration reminiscent of her personal experiences, examining propensities, habits, and patterns of activity to analyze the nature of the individual personality. In more recent years, she has incorporated observations of the weather and of plant and animal ecosystems into her narratives and the structure of her work. More than mere tools for accentuating these narratives, her elaborately crafted sculptures become scores prompting unexpected turns in her improvisational performances.

Visitors to the exhibition have the opportunity to examine these spaces as installations before and after the performances being held periodically throughout the exhibition period. The exhibition is a dynamic survey of Sasamoto’s unique talents, from notable early works to more kinetic recent creations.

Curated by Keiko Okamura, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Supported by The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan in the fiscal year of 2025

For more information: https://www.mot-art-museum.jp/en/exhibitions/Aki_Sasamoto/