Musician Yoshihide Otomo has returned to the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media with a new large-scale exhibition 18 years after his last solo show there. Titled Sokkyo! (Improvisation!), the exhibition opened recently at YCAM and runs for 136 days, through March 1, 2027.

Improvisation, the core of Otomo's practice across free jazz, noise, film scores, and his collaborative Ensembles projects, is both the theme and the operating system of the show. Working with YCAM's research-and-development arm InterLab and five artists from different genres, Otomo has built a space where sounds and presences resonate through mechanisms that never produce the same moment twice.

Two works anchor the foyer. Without Records, a signature piece Otomo first developed in 2005, is assembled this time from roughly 80 discarded portable record players, each modified by hand to sound without any record. A programmed power system switches the current on and off, so the ensemble of clicks and hums constantly reconfigures itself. Overhead hangs a colorful patchwork O-furoshiki cloth, born from Project FUKUSHIMA!, the civic initiative Otomo helped found after the 2011 earthquake — cloths gathered from Sapporo, Tajimi, Aichi, Fukushima, Inawashiro, and Ikebukuro, plus a new one made in Yamaguchi.

Curated by YCAM's Tsubasa Nishi, the exhibition treats the Isozaki Arata-designed building and its surroundings as part of the score. For Otomo, now 67, the return to YCAM closes a loop that began with his 2008 Ensembles exhibition — the show that pushed him toward the community-based practice he has pursued since the Tohoku disaster.