The Brooklyn Rail

The language of death exists in many tongues; the act of counting as a form of its capture one of them. Motohiro Takeda’s installation, which mimics a two-week long strenuous performance featuring the artist himself, is an embodiment of a funeral with him functioning as its psychopomp. Organized by gmtc (golden monkey trading company 金猿商社) in the dimly lit basement of the Nguyen Wahed Gallery in the East Village, Takeda sits, clothed in black, fixed like a sculpture, moving like a rhythm of a clock as his hands reach out towards a gigantic heap of golden gingko leaves in front of him. He scoops, cups, and picks from his heaping palms each and every remnant as he, in a grounded yet monotonous manner, loudly counts. He drops each leaf in an elongated piece of a hollowed shell of the same tree’s bark which he empties out into meticulous golden piles on the floor after reaching each thousandth. His goal is deceptively simple: in the two weeks of his exhibition, he is on a mission to measure the leaves a singular gingko tree births and sheds in its annual life cycle.

The act of counting started with an act of gathering; in the fall of 2025, Takeda, with his young children, frequented the Greenwood Cemetery to collect the leaves from a shedding gingko tree. Amongst the tombstones dating as back as the 1760s, he imagined himself as a reaper raking the freshly fallen leaves from the ground. He gave the fall, always symbolic with decay and endings, another purpose in the following spring, a season of rebirth and beginnings, where he changed his role from one who reaps to one who performs spiritual rituals to create passageways for grief.

In many religious proceedings of death, we see a repetitive gesture: the rosary, the tasbeeh, the incense, the candles, the prostrations, the dhikr on date pits etc. It is always a repetitive motion where one moves a small object in remembrance and embodies it in prayer. Takeda performs the same act in his exhibition. With every leaf he moves, he gives it an ode, a remembrance, and even a new name and identity with its titled number. He moves from a generalized image of nature to give attention to the singular element of its making which allows it to stand with its own power. As an audience, we are not just left watching but also waiting. We feel the tension of the beginning of its count of a hundredth and a relief when it reaches the end of it. And at the end of each thousandth, there is a pause, a break in the prayer. Takeda gets up to pour the thousand leaves into a pile on the floor before beginning again. We are reminded of his body as more than a machine: amongst the dead, he is the only one alive, giving respect to what has passed us.

The gingko is categorized as a fossil but a living one. It has a lineage reaching back 200 million years to the Permian period, making it one of the oldest trees on Earth. This time scale gives the tree the power of witness but also functions as a stark reminder of how differently we as a human race experience time. In a landscape which has moved from industry to one of automation, we have been experiencing a deficiency in attention and a lack of care for processes if the product doesn’t promise us something immediate and tangible. Takeda’s “counting leaves” is an act of defiance and revolt against this new era: it says to pause, wait, and partake in the process of mundanity as it allows for our bodies to regulate, to feel, and to be reminded of our own life cycles with death being an inevitable end.

“Counting Leaves” is a metaphor for a funeral. It enchants the audience to partake in the ritual to witness, grieve, and question purpose and existentialism. With every start of the hundredth, there is a silent communication: wait a moment, just a minute or two, see what happens. When the hundreds become a thousand, there is a spell of release in the room and an exchange of awe and relief. Moto, in breaking away from his counting to pouring the leaves into golden mounds, reminds us of the life we ourselves hold in our own bodies and its mortal allowances. When he carries leaves in shelling of the bark, we are reminded of the tree as a mother and her departing children, and how there can be life after this form of death. From the beginning to the end of each thousandth, the bodies of the viewers present themselves like hourglasses being filled and yet emptied of sand. We are ultimately left wondering about mundanity’s purpose but with a hope that regardless of life and death, there might be an existence of an afterlife instilled within our remembrance.

Motohiro Takeda resolved his exhibition and performance finishing his count of the leave which came to a totality of 58001.