Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I must draw your attention to the remarkable work of Naoko Sekine, a Japanese artist whose work challenges the established conventions of contemporary art with undeniable subtlety and intellectual depth, and who won, along with two other laureates, the prestigious Luxembourg Art Prize in 2023, an international artistic distinction.
Sekine is a virtuoso of paradox, juggling between immanence and transcendence with a nonchalance that would make your favorite conceptual artists envy. Her works, these shimmering structures where physical and imaginary lines intersect, are not mere objects to contemplate but devices that force us to rethink our relationship to space and time.
Take “Mirror Drawing-Straight Lines and Nostalgia” (2022), this monumental composition of almost three meters by three meters. The work evokes the urban landscapes of New York seen through the prism of Mondrian, but Sekine takes the experience much further. The nine independent panels of different sizes that make up the whole create physical lines that become an integral part of the composition. By polishing the graphite surface as one would polish a precious stone, she transforms the opaque material into a reflective surface, inviting the viewer and the surrounding space to blend into the work.
This approach strangely reminds me of Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on literary space, where the writer disappears behind her work to make way for the pure experience of language. In Literary Space (1955), Blanchot wrote: “The work draws the one who devotes themselves to it towards the point where it is put to the test of impossibility” [1]. Sekine materializes this point of impossibility in her shimmering surfaces, creating a threshold where image and reality merge, where the viewer is simultaneously inside and outside, as if suspended in a dizzying in-between.
When Blanchot spoke of “the essential solitude of the work,” he pointed to this capacity of art to create an autonomous space which, paradoxically, only comes alive in the encounter with the viewer. Sekine’s works perfectly embody this tension: their reflective surfaces absorb and transform the environment, making each experience unique and contingent. It is an art that refuses fixity and claims the perpetual movement of perception.
In “Stacks Ⅱ” (2023), Sekine plays with our perception of space by juxtaposing two types of lines: those physically created by the assembly of the panels and those drawn by hand. This dialogue between the material and the represented is reminiscent of Blanchot’s reflections on the distinction between ordinary language, which makes words disappear in favor of their meaning, and literary language, which makes words appear in their very materiality.
What I like about Sekine is her way of incorporating serendipity into her creative process. When she mentions the “accidents” that occur during creation and integrates them as elements of the work, one senses an artist who dialogues with the material rather than imposing a preconceived vision on it. This approach irresistibly evokes the principles of Japanese wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that values imperfection and impermanence.
The inspiration Sekine draws from the prehistoric French caves she visited in 2013 is particularly revealing. These anonymous artists from 30,000 years ago already used the natural reliefs of the walls to complement their animal representations, creating a fusion between nature and human intervention. Sekine continues this millennia-old tradition by integrating the physicality of her supports into the final composition. Art is no longer a simple representation slapped onto a neutral support, but a collaboration with the very materiality of the world.
Let’s now move on to the “Colors” series, in which Sekine extracts chromatic palettes from works such as Gustave Moreau’s “The Unicorns” or Edvard Munch’s “Model by The Wicker Chair” to create pointillist compositions of striking complexity. What interests me here is less the reference to these painters than the musical structure underpinning these works.
For here is the second concept that illuminates Sekine’s work: contemporary minimalist musicality. In her writings, the Japanese artist explicitly refers to the composition “Music for 18 Musicians” by the American composer Steve Reich as a fundamental source of inspiration for her artistic approach. This landmark work of musical minimalism, created in 1976, presents a particular structure where eighteen instrumentalists and vocalists collectively generate a sophisticated soundscape without the direction of a conductor. This compositional approach echoes Sekine’s artistic practice through its non-hierarchical conception of the whole: each musical element (or visual in Sekine’s case) maintains its autonomy while contributing to an overall coherence of the work.
The composer John Cage, speaking about Reich’s music, noted: “It is not a beginning-middle-end, but rather a process, a process that reveals itself” [2]. This description could quite as well apply to Sekine’s works, particularly her “Colors” series where each color dot, precisely placed within a coordinate system, creates a visual experience that transcends the sum of its parts.
Reich himself explained: “Music as a gradual process allows me to focus on the sound itself” [3]. Similarly, Sekine invites us to focus on the pure visual experience, rather than on representation or message. Her color dots create optical vibrations that recall Reich’s rhythmic beats, that pulse emerging from the repetition of similar but slightly offset patterns.
In “Colors-The Unicorns (383)” (2023), the color dots form what Sekine calls a “circular structure,” where no element dominates the others. As in Reich’s music, where instruments enter and exit the composition without fixed hierarchy, Sekine’s colors create a network of interactions where the viewer perceives movements, vibrations, and optical blends that do not materially exist on the surface. The work completes itself in the eye and mind of the viewer, just as Reich’s music comes alive in the listener’s ear.
This idea of the circular structure opposed to the traditional pyramidal structure of representative art is particularly interesting. Sekine rejects the idea of a central motif to which all other elements would be subordinate, preferring a constellation of elements interacting on equal footing. It is an approach that echoes processual minimalist music, where motifs overlap and transform gradually, creating an immersive experience evoking natural cycles.
The great minimalist composers have often declared they do not want to imitate, but simply understand processes [4]. This could be Sekine’s motto, who does not seek to faithfully reproduce images, but to understand and reveal perceptual processes that give birth to our experience of the world. Her “Mirror Drawings” literally reflect the environment in which they are exhibited, transforming each exhibition into a unique and contextual experience.
And what about her interest in Bunraku, this traditional Japanese puppet theater? Once again, we find this fascination with systems where different elements (puppet manipulators, narrators, musicians) maintain their independence while creating a unified experience. The separation between the narrator and the puppet, between voice and movement, creates an intermediate space where the viewer’s imagination can flow in, exactly as in Sekine’s works, where physical and drawn lines create a conceptual gap.
“Edge Structure” (2020) perfectly illustrates this approach. In this work, Sekine cuts an abstract drawing along its contours, then removes a square from inside and rearranges the elements to create a new composition. This process of deconstruction and reconstruction evokes how process music breaks down and rebuilds its motifs. The visual artist and the composer both explore how transforming existing structures can reveal new perceptual possibilities.
American minimalist music is famous for the “audible gradualness” of its musical processes [5]. This transparency of process is found in Sekine’s work, who does not hide the mechanisms of creation but instead highlights them. The joints between panels, traces of polishing, successive layers of materials, everything is visible, creating a material honesty that directly engages the viewer.
What I like about these parallel artistic approaches is their ability to create works that are both intellectually stimulating and sensually captivating. Minimalist music, despite its conceptual rigor, remains deeply moving and physically felt. Likewise, Sekine’s works, despite their theoretical sophistication, offer an immediate and visceral visual experience; these mirror-like surfaces that catch the light and transform space create an almost tactile sensation.
“Square Square” (2023), with its offset rectangles and different types of lines, creates what I would call a “visual polyphony” where different layers of perception overlap without ever completely blending. This layering recalls the “phasing” technique characteristic of minimalist music, where two identical patterns played at slightly different speeds gradually create complex rhythmic configurations.
I can already hear you whispering: “Another one of those intellectual artists making art for theorists.” Think again. What saves Sekine from conceptual aridity is her unwavering attachment to the sensuality of the material. These surfaces polished like mirrors, these lines that change appearance depending on the angle and light, these points of color that vibrate on our retina, all create an immediate aesthetic experience that transcends intellectualization.
This is where the true originality of Naoko Sekine lies: in her ability to reconcile apparently contradictory approaches. The conceptual and the sensual, the plane and the volume, the fixed and the mobile, the controlled and the random coexist in her works without nullifying each other. As in contemporary minimalist music, where mathematical rigor paradoxically produces an almost mystical meditative experience, Sekine’s works use geometric precision to open us to a more fluid and intuitive perception of the world.
If art still has a role to play in our image-saturated world, it is precisely this: to remind us that our perception is not a simple passive recording of reality, but an active construction where materiality and consciousness are inextricably intertwined. Sekine’s works, by making these perceptual mechanisms visible, invite us to a new dialogue with the visible world, a dialogue in which we are no longer just spectators, but active participants in the creation of meaning.
So next time you see a work by Naoko Sekine, stop for a moment. Watch how the light plays on those polished surfaces, how your own reflection mingles with the lines drawn by the artist, how the spots of color change according to your distance and angle of view. And perhaps you will hear, in this silent dialogue between the work and your perception, the distant echoes of those musical structures that so inspired the artist, those minimalist rhythmic pulses which, like our heartbeats, mark the time of our existence.
- Maurice Blanchot, The Literary Space, Gallimard, 1955.
- John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
- Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Steve Reich, interview with Jonathan Cott, The Rolling Stone Interview, 1987.
- Steve Reich, Music as a Gradual Process in Writings on Music, 1965-2000, Oxford University Press, 2002.
