Shinji Wakasa

An artist based in Berlin and Tokyo.
His work explores the materiality of sound and the ontological boundary between life and death. His installations are site-specific, built through multi-channel audio and organic materials layered into spatial compositions that invite audiences into ritualistic sonic experiences.

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HAKUMEI 2.0 (Faintlight 2.0)
2024 M.A.G.M.A Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

HAKUMEI 2.0 (Faintlight 2.0) is a multichannel sound installation exploring sound as a spatial and perceptual medium. Through darkness, light, layered textures, and subtle temporal displacement, the work creates an immersive environment in which perception drifts between proximity and distance, presence and afterimage. Rather than presenting a narrative, it unfolds as an experiential field that reshapes the listener’s sense of space, time, and bodily presence.

The Caul
2025 Culterim Residency, Dahlewitz / Berlin, Germany

The Caul is a multichannel sound installation built around the idea of the membrane as a sonic condition rather than an image. Composed from field recordings gathered around the residency site, together with sounds captured from organic matter and small living systems, the work transforms environmental traces into a layered spatial composition. Sound is treated as something that passes through, leaks, and changes—never arriving as a fixed form, but unfolding as resonance, circulation, and unstable presence. Through multichannel audio and physical materials, The Caul constructs a listening environment suspended between intimacy and distance, enclosure and exposure.

Yoake no Oto / DAWN
2024 Sony Park Mini, Tokyo, Japan

Yoake no Oto / DAWN is an immersive sound installation developed from Wakasa’s ambient album DAWN, translating subtle sonic textures into a spatial experience of sound, light, and vibration. Built with twelve loudspeakers and Sony’s “Active Slate” vibration system, the work constructs dawn not as a visual image but as a bodily and temporal condition. Through gradual shifts in tone, resonance, and light, the installation invites the listener into a suspended state between night and morning, transforming ambient music into an environment to be entered rather than simply heard.

Sus<caul>Pend
2025 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Presented within AGAINST THEORY, with Minori Oga

SusPend is an audio sculpture centered on a suspended white “module of life” placed inside a glass aquarium. Formed from urethane foam and silicone, the organic mass contains embedded speakers and electronic circuits, generating pulsating noise, altered singing voices, and collapsing fragments of phrases that form a thin sonic membrane between glass and air. The internal speaker structure also functions as a miniature version of Wakasa’s larger spatial sound installations, producing an unstable relation between body, system, and acoustic space. Presented in the satellite gallery “Tadaima” within SIDE CORE: Living road, Living space