From Sound to Image: On-Site Practices of Synesthetic Perception

The exhibition Nishiki Sugawara-Beda: Scale and Tonality is a project exploring the intersection of auditory and visual perception, born from the collaboration between Dallas-based artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda and New York–based composer and pianist Shoko Nagai. In this exhibition, Sugawara-Beda presents works created through her synesthetic perception, with Nagai’s music as the point of departure.

As part of a project at West Texas A&M University College of Fine Arts and Humanities, the two artists conducted fieldwork at Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, from December 15 to 16, 2024, spending an entire day together immersed in the landscape. Drawing on this experience, Nagai composed a roughly 25-minute piece the following month. This work reconstructs her physical and sensory experiences within the natural environment as sound, serving as an acoustic record that encompasses the passage of time and the shifting landscape.

Through repeated listening to Nagai’s composition, Sugawara-Beda is able to re-access the sensations of the canyon—the wind, light, and vastness of the space. For her, music is not merely an auditory object, but a medium that transforms the perception of time and space, leading to “a sense of time disappearing and floating in the cosmos.” When she closes her eyes, what emerges are not colors but other visual elements such as form, texture, and motion. These impressions are concretized in the exhibition’s central work: the six-panel piece KuroKuroShiro+ Scale and Tonality (2026).

This work represents an attempt to translate the temporal elements of music—its structure, rhythm, duration, and change—into a spatial and visual language, embodying the intersection of hearing and seeing. Such an approach evokes historical precedents of synesthesia in artistic practice—for example, Wassily Kandinsky’s exploration of the relationships between music, color, and emotion (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911)—but differs in that Sugawara-Beda perceives not color but form and motion.

Nagai, reflecting on her intention when asked to compose for this project, stated that she wished “for Nishiki to realize how deeply considered and structurally intentional her music is, and how the existence of music can profoundly enrich visual art.” This underscores her positioning of music as a creative medium that can engage on equal footing with visual works.

This project expands the possibilities of artistic expression through the traversal of different sensory domains and connects to recent practices in intermedia art and cross-sensory research. The collaboration between Sugawara-Beda and Nagai presents new perceptual horizons through the reconstruction of natural experience, memory, and sensation.

At the heart of this collaboration lies the profound presence of Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, a landscape where the raw visage of Mother Earth is laid bare. Its vast red soils and dramatically exposed geological formations have long captivated generations of artists.

In the late 19th century, Texas landscape painter Frank Reaugh (1860–1945) founded an art school in Dallas in 1897 and led his students into the canyon for plein air practice.[1] The celebrated modern American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) spent time in the canyon between 1916 and 1918, producing over fifty watercolor works.[2] In 1936, Isabel Robinson (1894–1976), then chair of the Art Department at West Texas State Teachers College (now West Texas A&M University), established the “Palo Duro School of Art,” positioning the canyon as a center for artistic education and creative practice. [3]

Within this historical context, Nishiki Sugawara-Beda and Shoko Nagai emerge as contemporary artists similarly inspired by the canyon’s profound creative energy. During their fieldwork, Nagai hummed melodies while walking through the canyon, and Sugawara-Beda captured these sonic impressions in her sketchbook. That night coincided with a full moon, and the following morning the two witnessed the sunrise together. These moments are remembered as a time in which nature itself seemed to celebrate their collaboration.

Palo Duro Canyon’s significance lies beyond just its geographical beauty; it is a site that visualizes time on a geologic scale. Its oldest exposed strata date back roughly 250 million years to the Permian period, while its current topography was shaped by river erosion over the last million years. Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation from approximately 12,000 years ago, with Apache communities present in the 16th century and Comanche and Kiowa peoples in the 17th century. These indigenous societies occupied the canyon until their displacement by the U.S. Army during the Red River War of 1874. [4]

Experiencing these layers of time and history, Sugawara-Beda reflects on her impressions from a prior visit to the canyon before coming with Nagai:

“As I took notes on the force of the river’s flow, I realized how small I was in the face of nature and how powerless against its force. It was just after a storm; the soil was an unusually vivid red, and insects carried by the wind bit my cheeks without my noticing. As I bent down to collect soil samples, my back began to ache, and attempting to sketch the chaotic landscape, I felt that another medium was necessary to awaken more of my senses. That medium turned out to be music.”

Nagai, in turn, describes her experience of the canyon in contrast to urban life:

“Being immersed in the canyon, I felt a profound sense of awareness. Living amidst the constant noise and chaos of New York, being suddenly placed in a space of ‘nothingness’ was overwhelming. It reminded me of the core that all humans inherently possess—the silent source from which we emerge, the ’empty place’ before everything begins.”

Thus, the canyon functions not merely as a backdrop for creation but as a catalyst that fundamentally stirs the artists’ senses, enabling a reconfiguration of perception across media—from sound to image.

The Intersection of Sound and Color

A defining feature of Sugawara-Beda’s work is her use of pigments that she herself produces and selects. In this series, the palette is deliberately limited to three colors: a reddish-brown from soil and white derived from gypsum, both collected from the canyon system, and black from sumi ink. This pared-down color scheme evokes the geological landscape of Palo Duro Canyon while simultaneously foregrounding the materiality inherent in the media itself.

Yet, within this triadic system, the artist achieves a surprisingly colorful effect. Gypsum is used to create variations of transparency and opacity between the white, reddish-brown, and black, expanding the visual richness beyond the apparent limitation of three hues.

The central visual language of this work unfolds through vertical stripes, drawn repeatedly from top to bottom. This motif is inspired by the way sound appears when rendered digitally—complex, layered bands that translate auditory information into visual form. Each stripe moves with an organic, undulating rhythm, its form subtly derived from the contour of a quarter rest. In this way, the composition does not merely depict sound but embodies it, transforming musical notation into a living, visual cadence.

Particularly notable is the use of sumi ink, drawn from approximately fifteen varieties, including several from historic Nara ink-makers such as Kōbaien (est. 1577), Kinkōen (late 19th century), and Kijuen (late 19th century). By differentiating among multiple types of sumi, Sugawara-Beda creates layers of black that vary in depth and texture, producing a complex visual field that transcends a singular notion of “black.”

An important aspect of the compositional process is that the black layers, which appear to form the background, are in fact applied in the final stages of production. This approach reverses conventional perceptions of visual depth while embedding temporal layering within the painting itself. As indicated by the terms Scale and Tonality in the title, the work translates auditory structures from Shoko Nagai’s music into a visual language. The scattered black rectangular dots on the panels— inspired by the shape of whole rest and half rest—correspond to accents and rhythmic variations in the music, converting sonic time into visual space.

Nagai’s composition, in turn, is built from multilayered acoustic elements including accordion, percussion, an Indigenous Colombian flute, and chants dedicated to the cosmos. Additionally, the sounds produced when Sugawara-Beda mixes soil and river water, or when they the two artists saw the sunrise together, are incorporated, making both the natural environment and physical action an integral part of the musical composition.

Initially, this entire process was captured on video solely as a record of Nagai’s work. However, the intensity of the experience led the video itself to be reconstructed as an independent medium, becoming a work in its own right by Nagai.

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda: KuroKuroShiro+ Scale and Tonality represents a remarkably unique endeavor: starting from the deeply personal, internal perception of synesthesia, it opens this experience into a visual language that can be shared with others. In this work, sound is not merely translated into a visual form; it is reorganized as shape, motion, and texture, acquiring a new reality within the format of painting.

What is particularly notable is that this synesthetic process operates through the mediation of distinct cultural foundations. The reddish-brown and white pigments derive from the earth of Palo Duro Canyon, carrying within them the force of geological time and natural formation. In contrast, black comes from the long-established Japanese medium of sumi ink, evoking spirituality, introspection, and invisible time. In this way, the work integrates elements of Western and Eastern culture—Southwestern U.S. nature and Japanese aesthetic sensibility—into a single visual field through the perceptual circuitry of synesthesia.

What emerges here is not a simple cultural fusion. Rather, materials and sensations from different origins are reorganized through cross-sensory perception, creating a new field of awareness that transcends conventional distinctions—visual versus auditory, East versus West. In this sense, the work functions as a form of communication: synesthesia is translated into an experience comprehensible to others, rather than being closed as a purely personal phenomenon.

Music plays a crucial role in this process, serving as the initiating force. Ultimately, all sensory impressions converge and are fixed within the painting. What emerges are traces of sound, as well as layered temporal, mnemonic, and cultural experiences. Here, painting functions as a “space” connecting disparate senses and cultural contexts.

This exhibition at Amos Eno Gallery, New York, follows and complements the project Nishiki Sugawara-Beda: Geologically Human — Travel Through Times and Cultures with Earth’s Materials, held at the canyon from January 20 to March 13, 2026 (organized by West Texas A&M University College of Fine Arts and Humanities, West Texas A&M University Department of Art and Design, and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum). While the former explored expressions inspired by the canyon itself, the New York exhibition deepens this exploration, emphasizing synesthetic perception as a central theme.

What these projects collectively highlight is that perception is not fixed; it is continually reorganized through culture, environment, and experience. Sugawara-Beda’s practice visualizes this variability through her synesthetic experience emerging from music, demonstrating that disparate worlds can coexist within a single pictorial plane.