TARO NASU is pleased to present sleeping beauty, a solo exhibition by Ryoji Ikeda, on view from May to June. This marks his first exhibition at the gallery in four years, following his 2022 presentation.

Ikeda has continuously expanded the possibilities of art by traversing the realms of sound and vision. Originating from electronic music composition, his practice is characterized by the integration of performance and installation, creating immersive, experiential works. His artistic achievements have received increasing recognition both in Japan and internationally. In recent years, notable highlights include the overwhelming spatial composition of his special exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which was unfortunately interrupted by an earthquake; the sensation generated by his ceiling-oriented installation at 180 Studios in London; and the success of his acoustic concerts as a composer held in London and Paris. Ikeda’s practice continues to expand in both scope and depth.

This exhibition at TARO NASU will feature data.graph, his latest moving image work, which can be seen as an evolution of data.gram (2022). In addition, the presentation will center on sleeping beauty, a series of works on paper acclaimed for their philosophical and austere beauty, alongside several new works. Triggered by a single numerical sequence, this series leads viewers toward the vast scale of the universe, evoking a sense of awe and an awareness of the immense world that surrounds us—one that may have been unconsciously suppressed. Moving fluidly between the virtual space of moving images and the physical presence of works on paper, sleeping beauty embodies Ikeda’s latest line of inquiry. The exhibition will comprise approximately 18 works, including moving image pieces.

Artist Statement – Ryoji Ikeda
sleeping beauty explores a fundamental asymmetry between an unfathomable computational state-space and the minute numerical fragments that are extracted from it and made visible.

Here, sleeping beauty names the vast totality of possible states that remain dormant: never generated, never experienced, never named. What appears in the exhibition is only a fleeting cross-section of that totality. A small number of “awakened” fragments are briefly lifted into visibility, only to sink back into statistical and perceptual oblivion. Almost everything that could exist within this space remains forever uninstantiated, unperceived, and unrecorded.

From a mathematical point of view, what appears is only a single finite string. Yet it functions as a section of a vastly larger state-space: an ocean of numbers in which almost all elements will never be named, computed, or seen. Against the continuum of the real numbers, the set of numbers that ever enter human awareness is, in a rigorous sense, as thin as a set of measure zero. Whether hidden patterns inhabit these digits, or whether they are effectively random, is not something we can decisively know.

From the perspective of information theory, this sequence is data. It is algorithmically generable, storable, and in principle reproducible. Even so, the event of encountering this one instance—at this scale, in this particular space, through this particular body—cannot be fully reduced to computation, storage, or archive. Something in the temporality and situatedness of the experience exceeds formal description.

This also speaks to contemporary AI systems. AI operates within vast numerical spaces and high-dimensional internal representations, and its behavior is mathematically defined by parameters and algorithms. Yet among the innumerable states that may arise within it, what humans can actually encounter is limited to a minute fraction of inputs and outputs, and to the affects, judgments, and decisions they provoke. Such possibilities are not stored there in any fully formed way in advance, but emerge only provisionally, in response to particular inputs, contexts, and processes of computation, before disappearing again. Between the formal model and experience as a lived encounter, an irreducible gap still remains.

This structure resonates with what Kant described as the sublime: the moment when reason confronts an excess it cannot encompass and its own finitude is exposed. At the same time, it connects to Lyotard’s account of the contemporary sublime: an attempt to present the unpresentable by foregrounding the impossibility of complete presentation.

Across the exhibition, stark numerical surfaces and minimal visual means do not so much explain this space as make our contingency within it palpable. For a brief interval, a few digits awaken into legible form; through that momentary visibility, the overwhelming remainder becomes perceptible by contrast—everything that stays asleep, unseen, and beyond the reach of our cognition and our technologies.
— Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda
Born in 1966 in Gifu, Japan. Lives and works in Paris and Kyoto.
Major exhibitions include: 2025 data-verse (High Museum of Art, Atlanta), Ryoji Ikeda (National Asian Culture Center, Gwangju); 2025–2026 data-cosm [n°1] (180 The Strand, London); 2024–2025 Ryoji Ikeda (Estonian National Museum, Tartu); 2023 Ryoji Ikeda (Amos Rex, Helsinki); 2022 Okayama Art Summit 2022 (Okayama Castle, Okayama), Ryoji Ikeda (Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori); 2021 Ryoji Ikeda (180 The Strand, London); 2020 data-verse(Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg); 2019 Ryoji Ikeda Solo Exhibition (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei), 58th Venice Biennale (Venice); 2018 Ryoji Ikeda | continuum (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Vienna Festival (Vienna); 2017 test pattern(180 The Strand, London); 2016 supersymmetry (KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn); 2015 micro | macro (ZKM, Karlsruhe), Dojima River Biennale (Osaka); 2014 supersymmetry (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi); 2013 Ruhrtriennale (Duisburg), Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah); 2012 db (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), Ryoji Ikeda (DHC/ART, Montreal); 2011 the transfinite (Park Avenue Armory, New York); 2010 Aichi Triennale 2010; 2009 +/- [the infinite between 0 and 1] (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo), among others.

・Selected for TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in AI” (2025)
・Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize (2020)
・Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Merit Award (2020)
・Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Artists Residency Award (2014)
・Giga-Hertz Award (Sound Art Category) (2012)
・Nominated for the World Technology Award (Art Category) (2003)
・Golden Nica, Ars Electronica (Digital Music Category) (2001)