TATSUO MIYAJIMA

In his two solo exhibitions with Gallery Baton since 2020, Miyajima has shared aesthetic achievements that are both experimental and elegant, ranging from his early work in the 1980s to his two-dimensional painting creations and his work with LED elements and various other media. For this exhibition, he presents a new series using mirrors as a medium as he explores the Japanese concept of ‘seimei(生命),’ which encompasses senses of ‘existence,’ ‘life,’ and ‘consciousness.’

The flickering LED counters that people immediately associate with the name Tatsuo Miyajima appeared in solo exhibitions at major world art institutions such as the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain (1996), the Hayward Gallery (1997), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1997) before coming to global recognition with their appearance at his solo presentation at the Japanese Pavilion of the 48th Venice Biennale (1999).

As a medium, the light-emitting diode (LED) offers a flexible means of expressing a key theme running through Miyajima’s philosophy, namely the idea that ‘it keeps changing, it connects with everything, it continues forever.’ In his work, LED digital elements repeatedly show numbers from 1 to 9 in reverse order with different speeds and colours, while eliminating 0. Reflecting the artist’s intentions, each LED component represents an independent ‘seimei’ with its own rhythm and identity. They are used as devices to show the individuality of objects as mediated by differences in their countdown speed and illumination. Focusing on the generation-transcending universality that the LED medium possesses as a symbol of the digital era, Miyajima has used it to aesthetically address larger discourses that relate to the concept of time and visualisation of the different entities associated with it.

During the pandemic, Miyajima focused on exploring the mechanisms of LED groupings. He describes becoming fascinated at this time with the ways in which the unpredictability of the LED timing, the colours displayed, and the overall situation of the flickering bore close connections to the basic concepts of quantum mechanics. The emergence of his new series making use of mirrors is closely tied to his commitment to embracing these probability-governed unpredictabilities and the resulting random changes and flows in more organic ways.

Examples of his new mirror-based series include C.T.C.S. k’in, which was inspired by a visit to ancient Mayan ruins and the use of the ‘k’in’ as the minimal unit of time in Mayan calendars; Hundred Changes in Life, in which cylindrical LED units form assemblages; and Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, in which square mirrors are arrayed into grid patterns. Works from these series are distributed in organic ways across two exhibition spaces. Due to their nature as materials, the mirror surfaces absorb the surrounding situation and the moving gazes of individual viewers, heightening the sense of visual immersion as the interconnected structure allows for a more complex experience and perception of numbers, colours, speeds, and patterns.

Gallery Baton