To be released in the middle of November, Pre-orders now available
　
Published as the exhibition catalogue for “Aki Sasamoto: Laboratory,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, this book marks the first monograph to retrospectively examine Aki Sasamoto’s twenty years of artistic practice.

Based in New York, Sasamoto has developed her career moving fluidly between sculptural expression and performance art. Since the mid-2000s, she has employed diverse media—including performance, dance, installation, and video—as needed to convey her ideas. She is particularly renowned for a distinctive approach: creating installations with sculptures, devices, and sculptural objects of her own design and construction, within which she becomes one element of the environment, performing improvisational works. Skillfully combining everyday gestures and actions with witty narration interwoven with shishosetsu-like (I-novel) anecdotes, her early works examined the nature of individual personality through analysis of quirks, habits, and behavioral patterns. In recent years, she has incorporated observations of weather patterns and plant and animal ecosystems into the structure and narratives of her work. Before and after the performances held multiple times during the exhibition period, the space is experienced as installation.

The title “Laboratory” refers to a space for experimentation, practice, or research. It suggests both an opportunity for viewers to observe and examine the ecology of Sasamoto and her work within the museum’s white cube, and Sasamoto’s own perspective as she attempts to carefully observe and analyze the various phenomena, large and small, that occur in this world. This exhibition dynamically examines the singular talent and work of Sasamoto, who has developed a unique practice, from representative early performance/installations to recent works with increasingly kinetic sculptural elements.

This catalogue serves as a monograph offering an overview of Aki Sasamoto’s mid-career, centered on exhibited works (a comprehensive examination of the artist’s practice to date). It features substantial content including the artist’s own words, newly photographed installation views by Yurika Kono, essays by Tim Griffin and the curator in charge, and a chronology of activities.

Exhibition

Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory

August 23–November 24, 2025

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO

July 2026, touring to the National Museum of Art, Osaka

Size: 257 x 185 mm / Coptic Binding / 192P

Text: Tim Griffin (Curator), Keiko Okamura (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

Design: Toshimasa Kimura

Language: Japanese / English

Price: 3,000 yen

Publisher: torch press

ISBN: 978-4-907562-58-8

Year: 2025

Aki Sasamoto

Born in 1980 in Kanagawa, Japan, Sasamoto left home for the UK as a teenager. She then moved to the USA, where she studied dance, art and mathematics at Wesleyan University. In 2007, she received her MFA from Columbia University in New York. She is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University’s Sculpture Department. Sasamoto’s institutional solo exhibitions include SculptureCenter, New York (2016); The Kitchen, New York (2017); the Queens Museum, New York (2023–2024); and Para Site, Hong Kong (2024). She has participated in international exhibitions including the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); the Aichi Triennale (2022); the Busan Biennale (2022); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); the Shanghai Biennale (2016-2017); the Whitney Biennale (2010); and the Yokohama Triennale (2008). She is the winner of the Calder Prize 2023, which honors a contemporary artist whose innovative work reflects the continuing legacy of Alexander Calder’s genius.