Aki Sasamoto’s work approaches moments of transformation and change: from the transition of a substance’s form due to weather conditions in her performance and installation, Phase Transition (2020), to the conditions under which a material breaks or reaches its tensile capacity in Yield Point (2017), she works across mediums and with humor, developing an idiosyncratic approach to artistic research. Her new book, Point Reflection, published on the occasion of an exhibition by the same name at the Queens Museum, is the first major volume dedicated to her work, but also the first to feature extensive writing by the artist, for whom language and fiction are important components of the creative process and work. In this conversation, we spoke about performance and process, research and “expertise,” and writing as a record of world-making. 

 

 

Rachel Valinsky (RV): The book Point Reflection follows a line of thinking that has been central to your work, namely the mathematical, physiological, atmospheric, and biochemical conditions under which a given event, thing, or situation is subject to change, break, rupture, and transform, and those conditions become ciphers and metaphors for everyday life and changes that occur in everyday life. Your work is distinctive in that it stages or approximates or approaches those conditions, in part, through installations, drawings, graphs, and speech, but also in its deeply curious methods of questioning. What about these topics attracts you? 

Aki Sasamoto (AS): I’m interested in how we define something or see a sudden change or event or difference, and I try to go that limit. The causes of these changes are usually invisible. We have to make theories about how the world works, and then apply them to our examples to see if they are actually true or not. I’m interested in the event itself but also in observation, confirming, defining, and believing. Sometimes I start with the simple concept, like “point reflection,” which is something I learned about in elementary school, and then apply it to lived experience; at others, I see something complex like ice turning into air, and I seek out where an explanation for that could come from. 

 

 

RV: Can you say more about Point Reflection and how you moved from this mathematical observation to the “central character” or focus of the project, which is an exhibition, a performance, an installation, a book, and a video all at once, and encompasses, in its form as an exhibition, the work Sink or Float, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2022? In Sink or Float, you made kinetic sculptures using industrial kitchen sinks (among other appliances) that you retrofitted with perforated Plexi sheets, on top of which snail shells and other everyday objects are continuously pushed around by an HVAC system. You focused in on the snail shell after you got interested in what makes the snail’s coiling orientation change course–in other words, what environmental, evolutionary, behavioral, or other conditions make its chirality vary from the norm. How did you approach move from this initial work on the snail to the notion of the point reflection? The snail is less present in the performance than it is in the book, where it appears on nearly every page. How did the snail become a  “character” in this “story”? 

AS: I found out about the hidden theme of “point reflection” through performing and improvising speech: I ended up realizing that the piece was about midlife crisis. I was also writing about it in the book. In my mid-forties, I find myself in the opposite position I was in before: I am a teacher instead of a student, a mother instead of a kid, and my drive and physicality are declining rather than, for instance, building muscle… I noticed that so many things felt very opposite, and I was interested in the experience of inhabiting this position, knowing how I felt when I was on the other side. 

In the case of the snail, I am now realizing that it pointed to some kind of binary that was happening around me and in the world, but in much of the making process, I was interested in exploring the state of flux I feel I am in. I wasn’t yet able to identify the moment as a “turning point,” to say, “This is a point reflection,” or, “This is a moment when I’ve gone over the half point of my life.” I was unaware that the piece would eventually put me in a place where I could spot the origin of the point reflection. Recognizing the geometry enabled me to find a model for thinking about this murky place of crisis.

 

 

RV: The snail becomes a kind of personification of that “crisis” as much as it becomes an object of study for you. On the one hand, there’s this identification with the potential of the snail to be otherwise—to coil its shell in the “other” direction—but there’s also an interest in tracking the science itself: the evolutionary biology and study of the snail. What place does the object of study or the form that becomes a model for thinking have for you? In a way, it’s a character, but also something to observe, something to project into, a pattern… 

AS: I like to make work that could simultaneously engage these micro-focused and macro questions of how the field even thinks of how to detect questions. I can get into the snail as a character, or subject matter, approach it through literature and storytelling, which draws me into an empathetic place. But I could also look at the snail as a specimen to extract data from, through which I can think about defining or theorizing possible structures of thinking. But in doing so, we touch upon how the science works, which is to run through those theories and refine them so they become more true, though of course this could also be phrased as “more convincing.” So you could be moving toward truth, but you could also be working toward making a more convincing case; you can keep editing to make it more believable. When I have a conversation with a scientist as someone who is not one, or who makes sure she is not one, I can be a devil’s advocate. I can treat what they say as just potential that has nothing to do with truth. These are really interesting simultaneous ways of looking at the same thing. Things like the snail could be approached in multiple, overlapping ways within a single sculpture. 

 

 

RV: You start with a hypothesis as a scientist might, but the framework of the inquiry you bring to the subject as an artist offers another kind of lens: one that unfixes evidence and proof, and uses that toward the “convincing” arguments you want to make or the questions you want to explore. In the book, you interrogate this phenomenon of the chirality of the snail shell and the asymmetries that we find in nature to think about normativity, eccentricity, and what it means to fall “outside of the norm.” And the book is structured around, in part, these sets of interviews that you conducted with evolutionary biologists. How did those conversations inform your process, and what tensions arise, if any, in confronting these very disciplinary frameworks that you encounter as an artist? 

AS: They’re not real tensions, they’re more performative on my part. First, I’m not an expert, but I also really like that position, so sometimes I play extra ignorant, because that allows me to think about my goal, my own artistic interest, which was to make the framework but also be constantly suspicious of it. I may have my own, almost scientific, approach to making a sculpture for it to be convincing… but to what end? I think the scientist’s approach is very similar, but the making of those frameworks, at times, feels more collaborative, because it’s relying on a lot more collective world-making. I sometimes like being a passive reader or an ignorant person because it makes me free from that responsibility of the field. But it’s also a tactic I learned for when I am interacting with an interesting theory that’s way too big and has already convinced the whole world of how the world is flat, for instance, or how water becomes ice. I still want to think about why we even bought into it. I use personal or other visual elements to make it look like it has nothing to do with this world-building cult/science, to stay in a place of solo daydreaming. That’s a tactic I use in those conversations. 

 

 

RV: Your performances often invite audiences into your ways of world-making, by adopting demonstrative modes, or modeling theories, disproving them, questioning them, bending them, and testing the potential believability or plausibility of an idea. How does this experience extend to the reader? 

AS: I wanted each chapter in the book to be different enough so that I could represent those multiple ways of being: I could be the one who is really thinking about how to make a sculpture; or a character in a whole life history with my friends; or I could be the sole character, like in an “I” novel, where all that matters is what I feel and what I see; or a student of the subject. Those possibilities being simultaneous is very important, because that’s how I want my artwork to be too. I can be multiple and associate these multiple ways of thinking freely in the same way a snail can be looked at through different lenses and mean completely different things. 

 

 

RV: The backbone of the book is this long but episodic text that unfolds over different chapters, some of which are very short; some of which are reflections on aging, or the midlife crisis you were talking about, or menopause specifically; some of which touch on the creative process and your activity of making and installing. Because your voice is so distinctive, because there is the sense that you are a multiple character moving through the book and these different forms, sometimes it feels very confessional or diaristic, sometimes it feels like the musings of a philosopher, sometimes it feels like a record of artistic process. I wanted to ask you about fiction in your work, and the construction of narrative, because one way we could think about this text is as a kind of experimental fiction or an experimental narrative form. How do you think about voice and yourself as a character in the book, which I imagine is different from how you think of yourself as a character or voice or speaker or body in a performance. And it’s interesting to me that the text in the book was written at the same time as you were developing the performance, but it does not act as a script for it.  

AS: I ended up not using the episodes I wrote in the book in the performance, but the topics are shared; every time I wrote something, that prompted a different position. So if the book is one text, say, then the performance should be a thought after having written that. The topic may be the same, but it should be something different. This is why I think fiction is interesting, because while you’re writing or reading, it’s believable if it’s working. But when you finish writing, it goes back to fiction, or to being “not real,” and you go back to your other reality. Everything that’s not now feels like fiction to me, or everything that’s the body I am inhabiting is all potential fiction. It’s almost like a Borges library of infinity, or something like that; the next texts may not be legible, but every scenario exists in the world, and everything outside your bounds looks foreign. 

RV: I love this idea that everything is a potential fiction. That’s also a very powerful way to think about science, about politics, about history, about any theory that has been sold to us. And in the case of the book, theories of aging or physical transformation or motherhood that you experience in the book come through in the singularity of lived experience, with intimacy and honesty. You write about not having desire in the same way, or peeing yourself a little bit at the gym after your pregnancy, or feeling the arc of your life has changed. You do this always by keeping the particularity of your individual experience in tension with less subjective ways of representing these experiences: a graph, or a drawing… These are two ways, then, that you approximate these experiences. I find in your work this kind of relay between trying to find the most precise way to articulate something and demonstrate it, and the complete slipperiness of the project of description itself. As you write in the book: “Does it matter if the experience exacts the description? A word or words may catch something for a moment, giving it the appearance of precision. But words cannot catch up with movement. A graph of life is in motion, and language cannot keep up with the slippery beast” (pg. 16). As one of the many forms that you are working in, how does writing allow for a kind of precision or improvisation or description, and how does that relate to speaking, to dancing, to moving, to making an object, to installing an object, to making music, for you?

 

 

AS: I’m looking at writing as a record of experiences of now. Whatever feels “now” quickly turns foreign, or fictional, as soon as it becomes a past. Every word’s a fiction. It’s not me the minute it’s uttered. So if the writing is a fiction and another entity to look at, I could revisit and read it again and then speculate about what prompted this person—the past me—to write this way then. There are a lot of ways to re-enter that fiction, which is why it’s good to produce writing as a record to go back to, but also to prove how different the reader may be, or how different I will be, in ten years. Reading an old diary is like being an audience member to the fiction, which is very interesting and potentially useful. 

RV: With this idea of writing as record: I’m interested in looking back at the writing as a record of thought or the state you’re in, and as a measure of change or distance from oneself or one’s words and thoughts. I’m thinking about the ways in which writing has informed your work, or been a more invisible part of the process up until now. You also work in other forms that produce material records: an object is a material record of a process of construction or production. Performance has an elusive relationship to the record. There is this tension in your work around how a document of thought or a proof can be used and toward what end. Thinking about performance, how does writing-as-record interface with things like the script or the score or the performance document, which are perhaps in a similar register, let’s say, to the record of a movement or of an event? 

 

 

AS: For me, writing is harder to unpack and to fuse with the process of world-building or meaning-making. But at the core of it, writing and making objects are the same as far as how they can work as a record. I am more aware of how materials or performing contribute to its expression. Art historians do this from the back end all the time: they have to figure out what the material, the shape, the color meant at that time the artist used it. I manipulate and contribute to the craft of the fictional objects. I think my writing as a record is a bit different from how many skilled writers construct their worlds: I’m barely doing any “technique” in writing. I’m trying to be as naked as possible there because I don’t trust that the reader who could be me in ten years would even get that far into trying to understand why I used that word and not another, or whether it was inspired by some Netflix series that I was watching that day. It’s much more slippery in language because the influence is much harder to track than in materials. There are so many alternatives for a single world. 

So I think I do almost the opposite of material handling. I guess improvisation is very similar: you’re trying to be as naked as possible, but because it’s so fleeting it also poses accessibility issues for the future. 

RV: I’m thinking about what is accessible or not accessible about any given medium or form that we might encounter your work in: a viewer’s experience sitting in a theater or a gallery, where we might see a performance of your work, or stand near an installation where things are in motion, is going to be different from a reader’s experience. I’m also thinking about how these encounters variously take place with an object, a text, and/or “you” as an “object of study” or thought, and how this too is inevitably different from what the work “means” or “does” to you. In the book you write, “I am always completely surprised by the gap between what I thought I meant to make and how I end up describing the object’s meaning when I perform. Maybe the object is running away from me, in its own slow way.” So here we have intention versus process and how you end up describing the object’s meaning when you perform it. There’s a continuum between intention and meaning, and in that continuum, the actual form the objects take becomes kind of opaque, or there’s something unknowable or fleeting about it that you don’t control, even if the production of your work is very meticulous and engineered. That sort of unknowability of the things you make themselves offers newness every time, or a kind of new perspective. But it also makes it such that they are not even accessible to you, perhaps. How is it that object is running away from you? And how is the object or installation or sculpture also its own kind of character in a fiction?

 

 

AS: The object running away is the ultimate kind of dating. It’s very sexy that you can’t come together. I think the unfolding of any story takes time. With the writing, I’m not trying to do the unfolding within the writing: I hold it as a record, and later I unfold it. In making it might be the same thing: I might spend one year obsessing over something, but once I’m done, I focus on unfolding the story. And a lot of objects that you inherit… you always learn more about, you never learn less. It’s entropy. It’s all unfolding, and you always find more, including lies, untruths, fantasies. So of course, intention becomes one of the meanings. Speech is one way, and writing is also one way, but I really want to focus, first, on surrendering to this entropy. And then I can put something out in the world and have a way of looking at it through this framework, that it is multiple. That’s a helpful reminder to me to keep unfolding. It takes time. 

RV: The book has a very different temporality than a performance, or an exhibition, and it is distinct from the time of thinking and making. I like this idea that you’re not unfolding in writing, per se, but that writing can unfold differently, somehow, in the book. We tried to think about that very intentionally in its design: the folds are literally visible, the spine is exposed, which is interesting in so far as the book can be laid totally flat, revealing the expanse of the double-page spread in full. And within this field of the spread, there is constant movement: the snail appears on every page in a slightly different orientation and position on a curve you drew, charting both time and space.

 

 

AS: Maybe it was a subconscious thing that happened, but I knew that I wanted to make some kind of flip book, because originally we had been interested in the movement. But of course movement inherently becomes time-based. Time can be stamped through the page numbers, which also rotate like the snail thanks to our designer (Kyla Arsdjaja), so it can be numerical, but it could also be spatial. With the snail, if this image is moving on each page, I can remember a page not by its number but by the position of the snail in the layout. People have different ways of understanding space or time, through orientation and positions, so that is an important element of this book, just like the multiple chapters.

RV: And the spiraling also reminds us that this image that is the “same” on every page is changing too. The flip book is one way to capture movement, but it’s also about seeing change, seeing transformation.