Gallery Koyanagi in Ginza presents a new series of collages by Christian Marclay, a pioneering figure in experimental music. Having started out using turntables and vinyl records as instruments before extending his practice into video, collage and installation, the California-born artist’s work interrogates how we perceive, construct and remember sound.
Placing auditory experience at the centre of visual form, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery comes on the 40th anniversary of his first visit to Japan and continues Marclay’s long-standing engagement with sampling and recomposition.
The exhibited works draw on fragments of popular culture – magazines, record sleeves, film imagery – reassembled through processes of cutting, layering and omission. In the Concentric Listening series, faces are reduced to hollow outlines, their ears preserved as points of entry into an otherwise absent interior. These nested forms ripple outward, suggesting listening as a cumulative, resonant act. Elsewhere, Oculi (Listening Trio) transforms record sleeves into apertures through which partial images emerge.
In Marclay’s hands, collage becomes more than a technique: it operates as a metaphor for perception itself, where meaning arises through fragments, overlaps and echoes.
