EXHIBITION REVIEW: AKI SASAMOTO'S LIFE LABORATORY

Still from "Random Memo Random" (2016)

Aki Sasamoto’s "Life Laboratory" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) is the kind of show that makes you wonder whether the artist is running the experiment or the experiment is running her.

Filling a large part of the cavernous museum, this mid-career retrospective—her first major outing on home soil—feels less like a survey and more like a pop-up laboratory where everyday objects are coaxed into philosophical slapstick.

Bits of fabricated food bob around like suicidal ducks in "Sink or Float" (2015); the artist staggers blindfolded inside what looks like a giant toilet roll tube in "Strange Attractors" (2010); a washing machine spits out bilingual soliloquies in "Delicate Cycle" (2016). It's all very New York, very post-Fluxus, and—crucially—very funny, often in unintended ways, which, oddly enough, might be all part of the intention.

But as Sasamoto herself put it to Tokyo-Metropolis:

"Comedy is serious."

Possibly deadly serious! Yes, the humour is never the cheap kind. When she attacks bits of deconstructed furniture in "Secrets of My Mother's Child" (2009) or "Skewed Lies" (2010) that then fight back, the gag lands somewhere between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett.

Skewed Lies, 2010

Sasamoto, who left Japan for the U.S. in her teens, has spent three decades calibrating herself to cultural whiplash.

"Facing challenges as a mid-teen was a great chapter in my life," she says, "which provided me with the goods whatever path or field I would have chosen."

Art, back then, was simply "a place to think through life stuffs, any life stuffs."

That teenage disorientation is the exhibition's invisible engine: every wobbly contraption is a memo from the deep end. Curators have hinted at a "restlessness and rootlessness" in her practice that Sasamoto seems irked by.

"I do not like to dwell myself in a place, a field, or a medium, perhaps because I get bored easily," she told Tokyo-Metropolis. "I myself do not feel rootless. I like to keep moving and shift my attention to a new question. Improvisation is something I keep thinking about, it is about calibrating oneself to each moment. In that way, you could say I like my art to be about exploration to become at home in a changing world."

The works bear this out. "Do Nut Diagram" (2019) flips between a graffiti-esque ensō (a Zen circle) and the luxuriant greenery it both obscures and calls attention to; while "Random Memo Random" (2016) has the artist jumping out of the hole she has dug for herself—both literally and metaphorically?—while acting like a hyperactive cheerleader .

Still from "Do Nut Diagram" (2019)

Improvisation is the method, a cutting and revelatory awkwardness the dividend.

"The possibility of different outcomes is the only way for me to get excited about performing," she insists. "Sometimes it does produce awkwardness, but it is worth my leaving it not locked in."

Language itself is another prop in work that often includes a lot of extempore speaking, like an internalised echo of New York stand up -- think Larry David meets Yoko Ono. Most pieces are conceived in English, but Sasamoto spent the summer in Japan before the August opening and simply switched registers.

"Speaking is another movement," she says, "I just need to practice calibrating to its method."

The bilingual performances—English performances are scheduled on the 6th and 7th of November—turn accent into choreography, a reminder that identity is less a passport than a performance (especially in our increasingly identitarian age). The personal, meanwhile, is merely a weapon in Sasamoto's arsenal.

"If I put out what looks personal," she explains, "especially by the time I put it out, it is something that is not or no longer is personal. It simply is a subject matter, narrated as personal."

Viewers are invited to launder their own baggage in "Delicate Cycle" and "Happy Hour" or to project their own stumbles and false starts onto the tube-bound performances. The effect is oddly democratic: a Japanese artist in Tokyo making New York neurosis feel like common property!

Spirits Cubed, 2020 installation view

Politics hovers at the edges. Asked about Trump-era Manhattan, Sasamoto sidesteps the obvious.

"Artists in this era must think carefully what is beyond the most visible part of politics," she says somewhat diplomatically.

Her answer seems to be the work itself—indirect, individual, stubbornly playful. Fellow female Japanese New Yorkers Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama loom as inevitable reference points, but Sasamoto rankles understandably at the mention.

"I did learn much from Fluxus," she allows, "but I would not have seen Ono or Kusama separately, just because I am Japanese."

Not everything lands. Some text-heavy and doodle-heavy projections clog the spatial flow, and the spontaneous performances can feel under-rehearsed in the wrong way. Yet the show’s real triumph is its refusal to resolve. Sasamoto doesn’t plant roots but she keeps the soil aerated. In a city that still mistakes conformity for harmony, "Life Lab" is a sly provocation: home is not where you land but how nimbly you keep falling.

"Life Laboratory" runs through November 24th at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. English-language performances on the 6th and 7th (click here for details).