Japanese artist YOSHIROTTEN’s largest solo exhibition to date, YOSHIROTTEN: BEYOND EARTH, opened on October 30 at TOKYO NODE in Toranomon Hills, Tokyo. The exhibition runs through January 11, 2027.

Spanning approximately 1,500 square meters of gallery space, some 200 meters above ground, the exhibition brings together light, color, moving images, and sculptural works. From new pieces developed with the cooperation of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to the artist’s most significant ongoing series, it offers multiple perspectives on a question that has long shaped his practice: how can the invisible be made visible?

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With its soaring ceilings and expansive windows overlooking Tokyo, TOKYO NODE GALLERY becomes more than a conventional exhibition venue. YOSHIROTTEN has conceived the entire space as a spacecraft, a place from which visitors might encounter distant locations, other times, and worlds beyond immediate perception.

Astronomical observation data, artificially generated light, and the cityscape unfolding beyond the windows converge within the gallery. Elements separated by vastly different scales of time and distance come together, inviting visitors to imagine what lies beyond the visible world.

YOSHIROTTEN: A Creative Practice Across Fashion, Music, and Art

Born in Kagoshima in 1983, YOSHIROTTEN is an artist whose practice moves fluidly between fine art and commercial visual culture, digital and physical media, and the worlds of urban culture and nature.

Through YAR, the creative studio he leads, he has worked with brands including Hermès, Nike, and Jaguar, as well as musicians such as Stevie Wonder, Tatsuro Yamashita, Hikaru Utada, and XG. His projects span advertising, video production, and spatial design, each shaped by his distinctive visual language.

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Alongside these collaborations, his independent artistic practice has consistently explored the possibility of giving visible form to what cannot ordinarily be seen.

One source of this fascination lies in his childhood in Kagoshima. Walking along unlit mountain paths and observing trees in the darkness, he imagined forms of nature different from those immediately before him. The act of looking at an existing landscape while envisioning something beyond it remains fundamental to his work today.

The exhibition brings together three series developed over approximately the past decade—RGB, FUTURE NATURE, and SUN. Each approaches the invisible through a different artistic method, yet all three intersect within a single exhibition environment.

RGB: 144 Monitors and the Origins of an Artistic Fascination with Light

Among the first works visitors encounter is Signal RGB, an installation composed of 144 monitors arranged across a wall, emitting light in red, green, and blue.

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Each screen displays its own moving graphics, illuminating the darkened gallery with vivid color. Viewed individually, the monitors reveal constantly shifting shapes and images. From a distance, the entire wall becomes a unified composition of light.

The work originated in a memory from YOSHIROTTEN’s middle-school years: the sight of screensavers glowing in an otherwise dark computer room.

Signal RGB was first presented in the 2019 group exhibition PHENOMENON: RGB and subsequently appeared in his 2024 solo exhibition Radial Graphics Bio at Ginza Graphic Gallery.

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For BEYOND EARTH, the installation uses 144 monitors, the largest number employed in any iteration of the work to date. Red, green, and blue—the three primary colors of light underlying digital imagery—extend beyond the individual screens to fill the surrounding space.

RGB is a familiar system in graphic design, but here it becomes an environment experienced through the body. The installation reflects YOSHIROTTEN’s continuing movement between digital image-making and the physical possibilities of space.

FUTURE NATURE: Where Imagination Meets Space Science

FUTURE NATURE is a series that uses technology and imagination to explore phenomena and forms of existence found in nature but invisible to the human eye.

Developed since his 2018 solo exhibition, the project brings together organic forms and distinctly digital textures, creating imagery that belongs neither entirely to the observable world nor to conventional fantasy.

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In this exhibition, that investigation extends beyond the natural world of Earth and into the distant universe.

The new works emerged from conversations with Hiroya Yamaguchi, a professor at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science who is involved in research using XRISM, the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission.

YOSHIROTTEN has long sought to reinterpret the colors, light, and forms of nature through his own visual sensibility. XRISM, meanwhile, is a space observatory designed to study celestial phenomena through X-rays that are invisible to human eyes.

Scientists analyze observational data to understand phenomena unfolding across the universe, while artists draw on imagination to envision worlds beyond direct perception. Although their methods differ, both share an interest in understanding what remains unknown.

The works developed through this dialogue take the form of paintings, moving images, and installations incorporating light and sound.

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Among them are Supernova, which depicts the process of a stellar explosion; Puddle Cygnus X-1, which visualizes X-rays associated with the black hole studied by XRISM; and Light Pulse, which transforms all-sky observation data captured by the International Space Station (ISS) into light and sound.

The presentation also includes A Hundred Views of Space, a moving-image work approximately 100 minutes in length.

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Here, information gathered through scientific observation reaches viewers in a form distinct from scientific explanation. By translating data into visual expression, events unfolding in the distant universe become immediate experiences of light and color.

A Historic Control Console from Japan’s First Satellite

Another dimension of the collaboration with JAXA is the presentation of historic objects from Japan’s space exploration program.

The exhibition includes the original control console used in the operation of Ohsumi, Japan’s first artificial satellite, launched in 1970.

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With its array of switches, instruments, and control panels, the console offers a tangible record of an earlier technological era, markedly different from today’s digital interfaces.

More than half a century after Japan took its first steps into space, the equipment now stands within a contemporary art exhibition.

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Also on display is a backup model of IKAROS, the solar sail spacecraft designed to travel using the pressure exerted by sunlight.

The history of technologies developed to explore space meets contemporary artistic practices that transform their observations into new images. Past achievements in space exploration and present-day artistic imagination become part of the same narrative.

SUN: An Ever-Changing World Born from 365 Images

SUN began with 365 images that YOSHIROTTEN created continuously during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since its debut in 2023, the project has developed across installations, prints, records, and books. A further concept, SUN HOUSE, envisions an artwork that can also function as accommodation.

For BEYOND EARTH, the artist has created a new moving-image work lasting approximately ten hours.


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A monumental vertical screen rises within the high-ceilinged gallery, displaying imagery in which colors and forms shift gradually over time.

Visitors can settle onto soft, cushion-like seating arranged across the floor and watch the changing compositions at their own pace.

One inspiration for SUN is the imagined existence of a silvery landscape deep within the Earth. By envisioning an interior world that cannot be directly observed, YOSHIROTTEN also considers familiar themes such as the passage of the seasons and the constant transformation of things around us.

Rather than reproducing a particular landscape, the colors and forms invite viewers to draw upon their own memories and sensations.

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The experience is less about watching the entire ten-hour work than about encountering the colors and light that appear at a particular moment.

Through its continuous transformation, SUN makes the viewer’s own experience of time an essential part of the artwork.

Where the Lights of Tokyo Meet Data from the Universe

One of the exhibition’s defining qualities is the way it incorporates TOKYO NODE itself into the artistic experience.

Across the galleries, monitors, neon tubes, and moving-image installations generate different forms of artificial light. Natural daylight enters through the large windows, while the illuminated city gradually becomes part of the scene after sunset.

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As the light changes throughout the day, so does the relationship between the artworks and their surroundings.

Rather than presenting a single, fixed visual environment, the approximately 1,500-square-meter exhibition space becomes a landscape of light that exists differently at every moment.

YOSHIROTTEN has described how the idea for the exhibition began to take shape in 2024, following his solo exhibition at the Kirishima Open-Air Museum in Kagoshima.

During a visit to TOKYO NODE, he looked out across Tokyo at dusk. As daylight faded over the city, the word “space” came to mind.

That initial impression eventually led to exchanges with JAXA researchers and the development of new works translating astronomical observation data into light, sound, and moving images.

Two hundred meters above the ground is an almost negligible distance when measured against the scale of the universe. Yet looking down upon the city from this height offers a different perspective from which to imagine Earth and the worlds that lie beyond it.

Giving Form to Invisible Worlds Through Imagination

At first glance, YOSHIROTTEN’s work for fashion brands and musicians may seem far removed from an exhibition concerned with the universe.

Yet both are grounded in a consistent creative approach: translating intangible sensations and ideas into color, form, light, and space.

In RGB, he investigates the expressive possibilities of digital light. In FUTURE NATURE, he explores phenomena concealed within nature and the cosmos. In SUN, he considers unknown landscapes and the passage of time through continuously changing imagery.

These distinct investigations converge within BEYOND EARTH.

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By interpreting astronomical data through a perspective different from that of a scientist, YOSHIROTTEN gives new visual form to worlds we cannot directly see.

His work also suggests that even the familiar cityscapes of everyday life may contain dimensions we have yet to recognize.

The idea of “beyond” need not refer only to the distant universe. It may also encompass what remains unseen before our eyes, memories of the past, or futures that have yet to arrive.

From approximately 200 meters above Tokyo, BEYOND EARTH opens a dialogue with these distant and invisible realms. It invites us to see the world revealed by science anew, through the imagination of art.