Sakamoto started playing the piano at 3 and wrote his first song in kindergarten. In 1970, he applied to study in the composition department of Tokyo University of the Arts and was accepted. During his study at the university, he was attracted by music, particularly the traditional music of Okinawa (an island in Japan), India and Africa, so he delved into ethnomusicology. He also studied classical music and came across electric music devices.

In 1978, he formed an electric music band named Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.

As the keyboard player and the songwriter, he helped drive the popularity of synthesizer-pop and pave the way for the study of classical impressionism.

He has also written a multimedia opera and turned US architect Philip Johnson's Glass House house into a musical instrument. He achieved this by sweeping rubber mallets over contact microphones on the surface to create a piece, not surprisingly, called Glass.

Sakamoto has scored more than 30 films, including Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) produced by Nagisa Oshima's, The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky created by Bernardo Bertolucci, Alejandro Gonalez Inarritu's The Revenant, and most recently, Andrew Levitas' Minamata. He has collected an Academy Award, a Grammy, a BAFTA, and two Golden Globe Awards.

This is the artist's first institutional solo show in China. It presents eight large-scale works and sound installations.