Ryoji Ikeda

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the National Asian Culture Center(ACC) reflects on the past decade and looks toward the future with Ryoji Ikeda – the artist who opened its very first exhibition in 2015.

A pioneer of sound and audio-visual art, Ryoji Ikeda(b. 1966, Japan) has long treated data not merely as information but as aesthetic material that awakens the human senses. Since the 1990s, his experimental work with electronic sound and data has explored the boundaries of human perception – posing philosophical questions about technology and existence through the repetition of sound, light, and mathematical structures.

At the opening of ACC in 2015, Ikeda presented test pattern [nº8], a large- scale installation that visualised everyday data – text, images, sounds – into high-speed black-and-white barcode sequences, accompanied by intensely vibrating electronic sound. Projected across an 11-meter-wide screen on the floor using eight DLP projectors and 16 speakers, the work immersed viewers in sensory overload, exposing the limits of cognition and the overwhelming force of the digital system.

In 2025 ACC Focus: Ryoji Ikeda, the artist returns with a new body of work built on more refined algorithms, an expanded spectrum of data, and heightened technical precision. Through this reunion, ACC revisits a decade of creative experimentation and invites audiences to explore how art reflects and reconfigures human perception, thought, and existence in our technological age. As Ikeda’s ten years intersect with ACC’s, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to contemplate what it means to be human in a world increasingly driven by data and algorithms.