John Cage: Ryoanji

An Exhibition Uniting Musical Compositions and Drawings from John Cage’s Exquisite Ryoanji Series

“I think of the garden or the space for the fifteen stones as being four staves, or two pages – each page having two staves. And the staves are actually the area of the garden. Knowing the whole of it, I can nd by chance operations where to put which stone.” John Cage

Uniting John Cage’s in influential practice as a composer and visual artist, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London will present an installation devoted to his celebrated Ryoanji series from the early 1980s, inspired by the rock garden at Ryōan-ji (“Temple of the Peaceful Dragon”), a Zen Buddhist temple that Cage first visited in Kyoto, Japan in 1962. This installation of 11 Ryoanji drawings and 15 recordings of his Ryoanji compositions for various instruments focuses on how Cage expressed his ideas and the garden’s sensibility in both his audio and visual interpretations.