To commemorate Yoshiaki Nakamura’s solo exhibition “Cyborg Butterfly: Threshold”, a talk event was held with Professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo, Asa Ito. Participants not only listened to the conversation, but also experienced the works firsthand.

Nakamura has continued to create work centered on “sound and communication” and “the relationship between hearing and vision,” drawing from his own experience of hearing loss and deafness. Since 2013, he has used a cochlear implant, and pursues expression from a position that knows both “a world with sound” and “a world without sound,” while not fully belonging to either one. On the other hand, Ito is a scholar of aesthetics who conducts research through interviews with individuals whose modes of embodiment differ from her own. Driven by a shared, profound fascination with the body and perception, their dialogue became a perfect crossroads for their respective explorations.

“Experience and Feel First”: Opening the Exhibition Through Tactile Art

Participants experiencing the paintings

Aligning with Nakamura’s desire for visitors to “experience and feel first,” the participants were invited to tactilely engage with the paintings before receiving any explanation. With bone-conduction speakers embedded directly into the artwork, viewers who touched the fingerprint-marked areas revealed under a blacklight could simultaneously hear the audio and feel the vibrations. One by one, the participants took turns immersing themselves in Nakamura’s paintings.

Observing the interaction closely, Nakamura and Ito noted, “People touch them differently.” Some tapped the surfaces lightly and repeatedly, while others pressed with their thumbs or index fingers, alternating between the pads and the tips of their fingers. Furthermore, while some participants felt almost nothing, others registered the vibrations instantly. The simple act of touching the artwork illuminated the profound differences in perception among the attendees.

In response, Nakamura spoke about what he most wanted to convey through this exhibition: “The sounds everyone hears, the vibrations everyone feels—the worlds people are sensing are completely different.” He continued, “Those differences can never be understood, but they can be shared. And what matters is that even when touching the same work, each person feels it differently. I am different from all of you, and each of us is sensing it in our own way.” This phrase,“it can be shared”,would become the thread running through the entire conversation.

Between Sound and Silence: Nakamura Speaks about the Sensation of the “in-between”

Ito & Nakamura during the talk event

Discussing the works on the first floor, Nakamura framed them as expressions of “the fusion of human and machine,” as well as “artistic output from the perspective of an 'in-between' being.” The genesis of his practice lies in a deep interest in “sound and communication” and “the relationship between hearing and vision.” Since receiving a cochlear implant in 2013, Nakamura has occupied a space intimately familiar with both the world of sound and the world of silence, yet belonging fully to neither. He pursues his art from this unique, liminal position.

“I want to create from the space between sound and silence,” Nakamura noted. This sparked strong interest from Ito, who responded, “For the hearing world, sound and silence are entirely separate entities, making it difficult to even conceive of an 'in-between.' ” Intrigued, she probed further into this unfamiliar realm.

To this, Nakamura explained, “Strictly speaking, just as the spectrum between male and female is a gray zone that cannot be cleanly divided, sound and silence should not be treated as a rigid binary opposition. That in-between is vast and cannot be precisely demarcated; it is an expansive zone.”

“A threshold, by contrast, is a specific pinpoint within that broader in-between. For instance, it is like the exact moment a hearing aid is switched on or off, or like crossing through the connecting door of a two-family home. I exist between the world of sound and a world without it. It is from this vantage point that I express myself, inviting viewers into that very space.”

This profound self-awareness—of existing within the "in-between" not as a thin line, but as a multi-dimensional zone—serves as the cornerstone not only for the first-floor pieces exploring human-machine synthesis, but for Nakamura’s entire body of work.

“I Used to Think Butterflies Made an Incredible Sound”: Flight, Identity, and Fusion

Participants experiencing the paintings

The butterfly motif, specifically the Idea Paper Kite leuconoe butterfly that Nakamura has used since his Nihonga works in 2009, originates in a childhood experience. Growing up with limited hearing, the butterfly’s erratic, fluttering flight led him to assume that “it must make a loud sound when it flaps its wings.” At the time, Nakamura frequently reconstructed sound by merging the faint auditory fragments he could catch with visual stimuli; to him, the insect's irregular movement was intrinsically tied to the sensation of sound itself. It was only later that a friend corrected this misconception, telling him, “Butterflies don’t make sound.”

The second reason for the motif, Nakamura explained, lies in the butterfly’s symbolic weight. He had read that in certain Christian traditions, butterflies represent souls that belong to neither heaven nor hell—existing permanently in the in-between. Furthermore, they are traditionally viewed as spiritual vehicles journeying across the thresholds of life and death, the material and the immaterial. This dual nature of the butterfly deeply mirrored his own liminal sensory reality.

“As a child, in one place I was told I did not have a hearing disability, and in another place I was told that I did. Each time, my identity changed. I carried that contradiction,” he said, layering those experiences onto the butterfly.

Regarding the vibrations felt by participants when touching the works, he explained that “Seeing transforms into hearing. It is that perception I am expressing.” He also described it as “an expression of perception.” The butterfly functions as a medium for externalizing his own perception.

This line of thinking also appears in the finer details of the work. Nakamura explained that the silver leaf portions of the butterfly represent the implant, while the use of pink evokes the firing of the brain. He mentioned that when hearing a sound, he can sense something like synapses firing in his brain, an experience he expresses through scorched traces and related visual effects. Here too, the biological body and technology are treated not as separate, but as fused.

Reality is Assembled Inside the Head: The Possibility of Hallucination

Scenes from the talk event

In the middle of the conversation, the discussion turned to how perception itself should be understood. When Ito asked whether the sounds Nakamura had imagined when he could not hear were different from the sounds he hears through the cochlear implant, Nakamura answered, “I think correction and conversion happen automatically.” He said he has a real sense that sounds he can hear disappear, and conversely that sounds he had not been hearing are generated within the brain.

Extending that thought, Nakamura said, “I think even the sounds we hear are a kind of hallucination.” He recalled that when he first heard sound through the cochlear implant, he felt as though he heard the sound before seeing his mother’s mouth move. That experience, in which perception seemed to arise differently from ordinary cause and effect, became the starting point for his sense that sound, too, is something constructed in the brain.

In response, Ito introduced the example of an acquaintance with a visual impairment who said they convert all the sounds they hear into vision, as though “living inside images they made themselves.” She described how the movements of a guide dog were understood as a kind of internal image like VR, and how that world could even be edited by the person themselves. Nakamura responded, “As Anil Seth has said, it is like a hallucination generated by the brain.” Their exchange became one that reconsidered the boundary between actual perceptual experience and the world constructed inside the mind.

“Vibration is Existence”: The Presence of Others that Emerges Through Touch

Participants experiencing the work “Threshold 7”

On the second floor, participants touched installations and sculptural works combining wire, wood, carbon, and other materials, experiencing the presence or absence of sound, differences in volume, and the way vibration is transmitted. Nakamura described the second floor as “a place to experience silence and sound, and to look inward,” explaining that it focuses on the conversion from touch to sound, or on the boundary line between them.

Here too, participants’ impressions became opportunities to deepen the conversation. One participant said that making form and producing sound felt closely connected, adding that “it felt like bringing form into being was itself connected to creating sound, and that made me happy.” Another participant, reflecting on the experience of touching the paintings on the first floor and feeling vibration, said they took it as meaning that “vibration equals existence.” On the second floor, they experienced the displacement between the place that was vibrating and the place where the sound was heard, and said that through that wavering sense of distance they wondered whether “this might be the world Nakamura experiences.”

Ito also recalled grasping one end of “Threshold 7”, the work stretched across the wall on the second floor, and imagining from the vibration the presence of someone beyond her field of vision. Smiling, she said there was “a primal joy in sensing that some living thing is on the other side.” It made her imagine birds lined up on a power line.

Responding to these comments, Nakamura said, “What each of us is trying to share is completely different, but listening to everyone today, I felt that people were sensing differences that are close to one another.” Again, what was repeated here was not the erasure of difference, but the possibility of sharing.

Scenes from the talk event

“A Tool for Grasping the World”: A Deep Trust in Touch

From the discussion on the second floor, the conversation expanded to touch itself. When Ito asked why vibration is so important to him, Nakamura replied that “from childhood, my sense of smell was weak, but in return my vision and touch were strong.” He said that touch is not simply a substitute sense, but “one of the tools for grasping the world.”

Nakamura observed, “Because the brain inside the skull processes information to construct our world, touch extends even to our feet. The entire body is an instrument of touch.” Through this philosophy, he articulated a way of engaging with reality that encompasses the entire physical self, deeply attuned to the faintest vibrations and textures. Citing a text, he noted that the fingertips are among the most sensitive sensors in the animal kingdom, and that they have developed extensively for manipulating objects and creating art.

This tactile centrality was beautifully underscored by his passing admission that he feels restless when not touching something: “For example, if I’m kneading clay, I could do it all day.” Ultimately, it is clear that touch constitutes the very core of his perceptual universe.

“Not a Cure, but a New Perception”: Redefining Technology”

Toward the end, Nakamura spoke about what technology means to him. In response to Ito’s question, he answered, “Technology is not treatment, but something that opens a new path of perception. Oliver Sacks argued, that disability is not a lack, but rather a condition in which certain senses stand out. The works made of wood express how the original body and brain are transformed through the brain’s plasticity in response to the sound of the cochlear implant.”

Recalling how, after cochlear implant surgery, people around him said, “Now you can hear,” Nakamura emphasized that this is not a narrative of recovery. It is “something entirely different,” a way of “opening a new path of perception,” and not a return to a previous state.

Ito responded that in her own research as well, when she speaks with people who have experienced bodily change through technology, they all say, “It’s not that I returned to my former body.” Referring to cases involving amputation after traffic accidents or illness, and to how bodily sensation is handled through VR, she noted that people there too speak of acquiring “a new hand” or “a new body of one’s own.”

The consistent combination in Nakamura’s work of wood and carbon, body and machine, natural and artificial materials is not unrelated to this understanding. The painting panels on the first floor are also made of wood and incorporate a bone-conduction mechanism. Wood and carbon materials were used again on the second floor. By overlapping wood with his own flesh, Nakamura uses the structure of the work itself to show a body that can change and a perception that can transform.

The Lingering Question

Left: Asa Ito / Right: Yoshiaki Nakamura

What emerged over the course of the event was the sensibility Nakamura repeatedly articulated: “We cannot understand, yet we can share.” His works do not communicate a single fixed meaning. Rather, each viewer and each person who touches them experiences a “question” that unsettles perception. Without erasing those differences, participants faced the same works, exchanged words, and gradually traced the contours of perception together. The experiential talk event for “Cyborg Butterfly: Threshold” became a concrete demonstration of that possibility.

Yoshiaki Nakamura's Artworks