The Taipei Fine Arts Museum has opened the first large-scale retrospective in Taipei devoted to Japanese composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in 2023. Titled "seeing sound, hearing time", the exhibition runs from 31 October 2026 to 14 March 2027 in the museum's first-floor galleries, and was organised by guest curator Yuko Namba.

The show traces Sakamoto's practice of installation music, which he developed from the 2000s onwards, through seven large-scale, site-specific works created with five collaborators: visual artist and theatre director Shiro Takatani, media artist Daito Manabe, artist Carsten Nicolai, filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and the artist Zakkubalan. Archival material from Sakamoto's 1999 opera LIFE is being shown publicly for the first time.

Rather than presenting music as something to be listened to in sequence, the installations use light, flowing water, data and moving image to turn sound into a spatial experience that visitors encounter with their whole bodies. All seven were conceived for the museum's rooms rather than transferred from elsewhere, and the presentation is the first time Sakamoto's installation music has been surveyed at this scale in Taipei. The curatorial framework follows four threads, time, life, environment and technology, tracing how Sakamoto dismantled the one-directional flow of conventional music.

Sakamoto worked with Takatani for several decades, and the visual artist attended the opening press conference in Taipei. The museum's director also spoke at the opening, setting out why the institution had sought to bring the exhibition to Taiwan. The retrospective arrives as Sakamoto's late work continues to be revisited in Japan, with a separate project restaging his final piano performances due to open in Tokyo in December.