Bending through the low entrance, I descended into a warm glow. The white brick walls reflected the golden hues of a large mound of ginkgo leaves at the far end of the room. A faint, earthy smell hung in the air. Off to the side, Takeda sat on the floor, counting the leaves one by one in a steady, unbroken rhythm.

On my first visit, there were only two of us in the room. Neither of us spoke. The space felt suspended, structured by the rhythm of Takeda’s voice. Almost immediately, I found myself following the count, noticing how easily it might slip. A leaf fell from his grasp. A number was briefly reconsidered. Rather than diminishing the work, these small falters animated it. They were proof that a human being, not a machine, was doing this. In a cultural moment defined increasingly by algorithmic output and automated precision, there was something quietly radical about a practice whose most honest moments are its errors.

The effort that preceded that performance was not visible to us participants, but required just as much care and diligence.  Takeda, a Japanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist, spent the autumn of 2025 making repeated trips to a single ginkgo tree in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, gathering its fallen leaves by hand among centuries-old tombstones. He separated them from debris, dried them, and carefully transported them across the river to the East Village basement that served as the site of his performance. Many were lost along the way. 

The question driving the work was simple and impossible: How many leaves are on a tree? For Takeda, the counting was never about reaching a total. He described it as an attempt to “count the uncountable.” To sustain attention despite its unachievable end. As the process unfolded, his daily rhythms began to orbit the life cycle of the tree, relinquishing the desire for control. Set against the ginkgo itself, a species that has survived for over 200 million years, the practice became quietly disproportionate. To count the leaves of a single tree is not to measure that scale, but to acknowledge it. The act gestures toward completeness, yet remains bound to incompletion. His inability to accomplish the goal he set out to do was not a flaw but inextricable from the artwork itself. 

In his practice more broadly, Takeda has spoken of cultivating what he calls a garden of time, something akin to a karesansui, a Japanese stone garden that holds the universe within a contained space. In a basement in the East Village, among tens of thousands of ginkgo leaves, that is precisely what he built.

I returned on the closing night. The room was full. All eight observer seats were taken. People moved in and out; children passed through; noise seeped in from the street above. I found, to my surprise, that I had to work much harder to focus. The distraction was not just around me but inside me. I understood, newly, what Takeda had been holding against all along.

At one point, somewhere deep in the fifty-six thousands, he lost his count. A brief pause, a gap in the rhythm. Then, from across the room, a woman who had been watching intently leaned forward and offered the next number back to him. He accepted it. The counting resumed.

That moment, the boundary between observer and participant dissolved almost imperceptibly, and what remained was something rarer: a shared accountability, ungoverned by any instruction. 

As Byung-Chul Han suggests in The Burnout Society, the crisis of contemporary life is not simply information overload, but the erosion of deep, contemplative attention into fragmented “hyperattention.” We have lost the capacity to dwell, to linger, and to let something take time. What Takeda offers is not simply a slowing down but a reorientation. In a basement beneath a city that does not know how to stop, something unexpected happened: we slowed anyway. Not because we were told to, but because, at some point, it became necessary.