Cover Ryuichi Sakamoto performing at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 2013 (Photo: Getty Images)
Ryuichi Sakamoto performing at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 2013 (Photo: Getty Images)
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‘Kagami’, which will come to Hong Kong next month, brings the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s spirit back to the stage—not through illusion, but through presence and profound respect for the artist’s legacy
There are no screens in Kagami. No projectors or hologram gimmicks, no pixelated mirage of a man brought back to life. Instead, there is a circle of 80 people seated in darkness, wearing glasses that dissolve the boundary between reality and illusion. When the lights return, there he is—the late Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, seated at the piano, his fingers floating across the keys with the restraint and tenderness that defined his art. The effect is not that of seeing a ghost, but rather of being present with him once again.
For Todd Eckert, the director behind this mixed reality concert, which will run from February 27 to March 15 in the city as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, this absence of mediation is vital. “There’s no way to see this kind of work in a traditional screen,” he says, referring to filmed concerts. “We’re so used to consuming everything on screens, but Kagami is about presence, about feeling that the performer is truly there with you.”
To music lovers who have never attended the legend’s live concerts, Kagami (“mirror” in Japanese) presents a “second chance”. But Todd says the show offers more than this. While viewers in typical live concerts are restricted to their seats, which are usually far away from the performer, Kagami’s audience can walk around Sakamoto, study his hands, or simply sit still as visuals and sound unfurl above them. The technology behind it is intricate, involving 48 cameras that, together with motion capture and spatial audio equipment, capture Sakamoto’s form in full-dimensional detail and embed that performance directly into the augmented environment.
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Above Ryuichi Sakamoto in ‘Kagami’ (Photo: courtesy of Tin Drum and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
Ryuichi Sakamoto in ‘Kagami’ (Photo: courtesy of Tin Drum and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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Eckert’s company, Tin Drum, which produced Kagami, is known for creating XR (extended reality) or mixed reality theatrical performances. In 2019, it famously created The Life, a mixed reality film experience featuring performance artist Marina Abramović, which premiered at London’s Serpentine Gallery and was sold in a 2020 Christie’s auction. Visitors wore a headset and walked into a digital space where a hyper-realistic image of Abramović delivered an original performance. “The Life is dealing with what is going to stay after I’m not here anymore,” says Abramović in a Christie’s interview video. “There is always this great idea of immortality [surrounding art]. Once you die, the work will never die because the work of art can continue in performance. The piece is only the memory of the audience, and nowhere else. Here, I am kept forever.”
Kagami has a similar notion: it is set out to be, in Eckert’s words, “an authentic presentation of a great artist in performance”. Eckert and Sakamoto, introduced by the latter’s manager David Rubinson, had known each other for years. When work began on the project, Sakamoto was still alive. “At that time it had nothing to do with mortality,” Eckert says. “We were thinking about extending his relationship with audiences into places where he couldn’t physically be.” Touring had become increasingly difficult for the highly sought-after composer, especially in 2014, when he was battling cancer. Yet his desire to communicate with his fans through sound never faded. Kagami, which took four years to create, was a way to preserve that exchange, which level of immersion isn’t quite the same as a VR or hologram show.
Above ‘Kagami’, a mixed reality Ryuichi Sakamoto concert (Photo: courtesy of Marissa Apler, The Shed and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
‘Kagami’, a mixed reality Ryuichi Sakamoto concert (Photo: courtesy of Marissa Apler, The Shed and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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Sakamoto, who was in remission in 2015, had been closely involved with every element of the show, from the design and the form to the flow of experience. Yet, in a poignant twist of fate, he was diagnosed with cancer for a second time the morning filming was scheduled to begin in November 2020. He had originally wanted the team to capture him at a grand piano, but the feeble composer could no longer sit upright. His head was down by the key bed. The team had to make major technical adjustments, which became part of the work’s emotional gravity.
Sakamoto died in March 2023, before the premiere of the show three months later at The Shed in New York City. “It’s funny, David later said maybe he had the feeling that he might be playing and listening to these songs for the last time,” Eckert says quietly.
While the timing of the premiere made Kagami feel like a eulogy—and indeed some audience members in New York were sobbing throughout the concert—Eckert stresses that it isn’t. It is also not a replacement for the musician himself. “Bringing anybody back from the dead if they did not explicitly agree to it is something I could never do,” he stresses. “If we are writing about culture and experiences, we want to present them in the best way possible. If we are creating festivals, we want to do something that touches people and shapes how they understand the world. The representation of an artist must be as authentic and human as possible. If you don’t have the artist’s participation, you don’t have the information. You could fake it, but it would be a lie, and our art is too important to lie about.”
Above Ryuichi Sakamoto, Todd Eckert (second to the right) and the Tin Drum team (Photo: courtesy of Tin Drum and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
Ryuichi Sakamoto, Todd Eckert (second to the right) and the Tin Drum team (Photo: courtesy of Tin Drum and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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Watching Kagami is not simply watching the composer perform; it is sensing his attentiveness, his curiosity, his endlessly searching ear. Eckert still remembers those qualities vividly. “I remember I was sitting at a dinner with him. I could tell when he was hearing something new,” he says with a faint laugh. “He’d just stop and smile, listening. The world always presented itself to him as sounds.”
That sensitivity has changed the way Eckert perceives art and life. “Ryuichi made us all hear differently,” he says. “He wasn’t content with being one of the most famous musicians in the world. He was always trying to find new ways of expressing his relationship with sound.”
For all its technical sophistication, Kagami remains rooted in simple human intent: to restore meaning to the act of creation. Tin Drum’s philosophy, Eckert explains, stems from his own childhood. “I grew up really poor. My parents and I moved a lot. We had very few books and very little music. But everything that we had wound up being really important because there just wasn’t much of it. So you studied it. You lost yourself in this stuff,” he says. “The world today has gotten incredibly sophisticated in figuring out ways to generate income from media of every sort. We’ve also lost the expectation that the media we consume will mean something to us. [Kagami and my other productions] are a way of presenting human intention and making something beautiful and powerful in a way that it feels eternal.”
Above Ryuichi Sakamoto (Photo: courtesy of Luigi and Iango and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
Ryuichi Sakamoto (Photo: courtesy of Luigi and Iango and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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After Kagami, Eckert’s attention turns to his new production An Arc, featuring multiple performers, including Ian McKellen, captured in simultaneous dimensional recordings. He also teases that he is planning to develop a project with a celebrated Shanghai-based cinematographer, long-time creative partner of Wong Kar Wai, who will reimagine cinematic experience altogether. “We’re not working in a place of traditional film. There is no screen. This cinematographer is incredibly good at creating space that is unlike anything else that anybody has ever created,” he says, commenting on how the cinematographer’s previous work has captured more than just the streets and corners of Hong Kong—but also their energy and emotions.
As innovative Tin Drum’s technical approaches are, Eckert says the key to creating each mind-blowing project is a curious and creative mind. “If you start with tools that already exist, you’re just making the same stuff as everyone else,” he says. “We start with what should exist, and then invent the tools to make it possible.”
It is a philosophy that mirrors Sakamoto’s own path: restless, questioning, ethical, open to wonder. In that way, Kagami is less about technology than about tenderness—a conversation between two artists who, across time and mortality, continue to listen to each other.
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
