OTOMO Yoshihide is active as a musician in a broad range of musical fields from improvised to popular, and works on soundtracks for cinema and TV among many other things. At the same time, he has so far created and exhibited installation pieces and numerous other works in the realm of art, which have been featured in various exhibitions at museums and galleries.

This exhibition couples "quartets," a commissioned work made in 2008 at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], with a new sound installation created for this exhibition, titled "guitar solos 1."

The general theme is "between music and art." Music and art as two different types of artistic expression have up to this point developed individually in both institutional and methodical terms, so we can say that they have been operating within totally different systems regarding production techniques and markets. Differences between both exist in several respects, such as the relationship between creator and audience, methods of distributing and presenting works, etc.

Against this backdrop, various creative activities characterized by mutual intervention between music and art have emerged since the 1960s. The results of such endeavors have been referred to as "intermedia," "performance" or "sound art," which later, with the development of environments enabling the utilization of various media, led to the establishment of "media art" and other forms of expression labeled as "interdisciplinary." While expanding the traditional definitions and interpretations of artistic genres, such endeavors have at once blurred the boundaries that once existed between them. This is exactly what has made it possible for artists like OTOMO to create works that are situated right in the middle "between music and art."

This exhibition focuses on the dissimilarities between the originally different disciplines of music and art, with the aim to define through several installations and various related events what exists "between" these two systems.