Conversation is the best form of entertainment — as long as you name-drop the right elements.
The cosmicequilibrium of Takeshi Yasura for instance.
I walked into the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa expecting slick minimalism. Instead, I got a new theory of gravity.
Gallery 5 is made of glass. So isCosmos, the sculpture standing at its center like it’s meditating on the temperature of the universe. Turns out Yasura had gone to Annapurna in the spring of 2023. Not to “find himself” (thank god), but to study hill tribes and collect glaciers — yes, actual glacier water. Somewhere up there, a monk told him something simple:
"Water is necessary for all people. It sustains life and transcends race and social status.”
What followed isn’t a monument.
It’s a mechanism. A metaphor. A miracle in balance.
Cosmosis a living diagram.
Inside: a storm glass that reads the weather, a radiometer that converts light into motion, and a cocktail of camphor, ammonium nitrate, sodium chloride, ethanol, and sacred water — not bottled, but gathered on a mountain by a human hand.
Above: a stone from the same region, carved like ayajirobēdoll, balanced so precisely you forget how heavy the world can be.
Below: a base of marble and cedar, time stacked on time.
My Western mind whispered:Foucault.
Not the theorist — the pendulum.
That 19th-century marvel that proved the Earth’s rotation by swinging slowly, relentlessly, as if choreographed by the cosmos.
Yasura’sCosmosdoes the opposite.
It doesn’t measure the planet’s spin. It balances its sorrow.
No swing. No drama. Just tension held. Just equilibrium — silent, fragile, perfect.
And around it: a queue.
Polite. Patient. Entirely Japanese.
Not one person tried to step ahead. Everyone waited their turn to watch something that didn’t move.
I stood there, thinking:
If Foucault showed us the Earth was turning, Yasura reminds us it might be tipping.