Tatsuo Miyajima is one of Japan’s foremost sculptors and installation artists. Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, Miyajima’s supremely technological works have centred on his use of digital light-emitting diode (LED) counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them, since the late 1980s. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious – though not necessarily sequential – cycles from 1 to 9, represent the journey from life to death, the finality of which is symbolized by ‘0’ or the zero point, which consequently never appears in his work. This theory derives partially from humanist ideas, the teachings of Buddhism, as well as from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connect with All’, and ‘Goes on Forever’. Miyajima’s LED numerals have been presented in grids, towers, complex integrated groupings or circuits and as simple digital counters, but are all aligned with his interests in continuity, connection and eternity, as well as with the flow and span of time and space. ‘Time connects everything’, says Miyajima. ‘I want people to think about the universe and the human spirit.’
Read MoreTatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan. He finished undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986 after which he began experimenting with performance art before moving on to light-based installations. In addition to participating in numerous international biennales and important group shows, he has held solo exhibitions at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2011), Miyanomori Art Museum, Hokkaido (2010), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1997), Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (1996) and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (1996). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1988, 1999) and in numerous group exhibitions, from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012) to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2008). In 2006, Miyajima was selected to serve as Vice President of Tohoku University of Art and Design.
Ocula Conversation Sunjung Kim’s Real DMZ Project Interrogates the North and South Korea Divide By Sherry Paik, Seoul Ongoing since 2012, the Real DMZ Project interrogates the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea through annual, research-based exhibitions that bring together the works of Korean and international artists. Sunjung Kim, the independent curator behind the project, conceived the idea of exploring the DMZ while curating Japanese...
Ocula Conversation Tatsuo Miyajima By Stella Rosa McDonald, Sydney Every artist has a lover. Yves Klein has blue. Louise Bourgeois has the spider. Ed Ruscha has words. The Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima has numbers; he paints them on the folds of bright kimonos, he draws them in sketchbooks, he fills walls, floors, pools of water and piles of coal with glowing numerals. His shirts are tailor made with...
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Ocula Report 'Mission [Spacexart]: Beyond Cosmologies' And 'Chronicle 1995' At The Museum Of Contemporary Art, Tokyo By Annabel James, Tokyo Too many Tokyoites miss the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) altogether. Beyond both the Ueno museums and the network of newer art spaces in Roppongi, this institution of first-class exhibition facilities, a vast pubic art library and one of the most significant global collections of contemporary Japanese art takes you by surprise in Old...
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Related Press 'Time, Light, Japan': Japanese art from the 1990s to now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 4 April 2017, Art Radar Journal From 17 December 2016 to 30 April 2017 the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney presents Time, light, Japan: Japanese art 1990s to now. The exhibition explores time and light through video, photography, sound and installation from the 1990s to now. Drawing from the gallery's collection, the exhibition brings together the works of eight...
Related Press Tatsuo Miyajima: connect with everything | time, light, japan: japanese art 1990s to now 30 January 2017, Artlink It's something of a cliché in Western art history that canons shake when revolutions sound. Social change precipitates stylistic reinvention and the same can be said in reverse. Although they might gesture back, time and style share an aggressively forward momentum. Over a career spanning more than three decades, Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima...
Related Press The Art of Numbers: Japan's Tatsuo Miyajima at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 27 January 2017, Art Radar Journal Born in Tokyo in 1957 and based in Ibaraki, Japan, Tatsuo Miyajima is well-known for his sculptures and room-scale installations, which have as their centre point the use of light and numbers. He often incorporated contemporary technological materials such as electric circuits, video and computers. Since the late 1980s he has focused on LED...
