Settling down into Yukio Fujimoto's "Ears with Chair" (1990) and adjusting the two long tubes on either side to your ears, the drone of the electronic organs on the surrounding walls both intensifies and hollows out. The hushed voices of mingling spectators magnify, as do passing footsteps. You cannot help but feel eloquently isolated, set apart from all else that goes on around you. It is a subtle experience that is pregnant with significance, and partly inexplicable.
"People aren't listening to music," says Fujimoto, "they're listening to space." He has also noted that "the ear doesn't hear 'there,' always 'here.' "
The 57-year-old artist, who represented Japan with his "small sounds" at this year's Venice Biennale, is currently enjoying a retrospective at the Otani Memorial Art Museum. "Yukio Fujimoto: Philosophical Toys," assembles 72 works he has previously shown in the "Audio Picnic" series of one-day exhibitions at the same museum in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, over the last 10 years.