TATSUO MIYAJIMA

‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connected with everything’ and ‘Continue forever’ are three parameters, with which Tatsuo Miyajima (*1957) epitomizes his multifaceted oeuvre. The artist’s work harnesses technology together with fundamental existential considerations and at least since the presentation of his work Mega Death in the Japanese pavilion at the Biennale in Venice in 1999 has achieved international standing.

In the new wall pieces, coloured LED numeric displays have been mounted in square-shaped reflective panels. Several of these panels go to make up a work and are each fixed to the wall at slightly different angles so as to reflect the surrounding space and thus creating an interrelationship between time and space.

Controlled by a complex algorithm, which despite its apparent randomness is in fact subject to a precise logic – the numbers 1-9 light up in a hypnotic rhythm. Inspired by Japanese cherry blossoms (sakura), the individual LEDs are arranged to resemble falling flowers on the reflecting surfaces. A poetic excursion on space and time takes shape in the interplay between the surroundings and each of the reflecting units.

“New technologies and old traditions coexisted naturally within my everyday life” the artist says explaining the foundation of his three-pronged approach using oriental philosophy, technology and contemporary theory. This also is the way Myajima’s axioms ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connected with everything’ and ‘Continue forever’ relate to his analysis of the theoretical writings of Deleuze and Guatari. For the contemporary formation of knowledge for such important thinkers this propagated heterogeneity and change as a means of the acquisition of awareness. The cyclical nature of Tatsuo Myajima’s oeuvre, the continuous change which forms the basis of his works is an invitation to a meditative contemplation on the impermanence of all being and the ‘dependent causality’ of space and time.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney has recently hosted a comprehensive retrospective of the artist.