Tatsuo Miyajima
At the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)
Our lives are governed by time—measured on watches, mobile telephones, and laptops. The passage of time is the central theme of Japanese multi-media artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s art practice. He makes sculptures and large immersive installations using LED digital counters as his primary material. Going into his recent survey show—which is part of the MCA’s annual International Art Series—viewers found themselves surrounded by rooms filled with flashing numbers, initially appearing like a mass of digital alarm clocks. The effect made me queasy.
Miyajima is one of Japan’s foremost contemporary artists and this exhibition, entitled Connect with Everything, represents his first major retrospective in the Southern Hemisphere. During his 40-year career he represented Japan at the 1999 Venice Biennale and, last year, held an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This Sydney show is his largest career survey to date.
Tatsuo Miyajima (b.1957) began his career as a painter before moving into performance art, influenced by artists such as Christo and Joseph Beuys. Living in Tokyo in the 1980s, he found a store that sold DIY electronic kits and began experimenting with LED technology. He became a pioneer in digital light installations. His fascination with numbers is all consuming, almost obsessive. It informs all his practice, much as polka dots are at the center of Yayoi Kusama’s art practice.
The concept is abstract; yet simple. His electronic circuits count down from nine to one, measuring the human life cycle in its most basic form. Zero is absent from his numerical lights as, according to Miyajima, it represents the invisible form, or the ‘void,’ that exists between one life and the next. It references the Buddhist belief that life is seen as an endless cycle, with death followed by reincarnation or rebirth. In contrast, Western philosophy views life in a linear progression, bookmarked by birth and death.
The artworks on display ranges from sculptures, such as Pile Up, in which light counters are scattered over a plastic mound that resembles a Buddhist stupa, to whole room installations. The most memorable of these is Mega Death—a vast darkened room in which three walls are swathed with shimmering blue numbers counting down at various speeds from nine to one. At various points, all the digital numbers suddenly turn off, representing moments in time such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima, in which thousands of lives ended in an instant. The effect is disorienting, powerful, and moving.
Another work, entitled Time Train to the Holocaust is composed of a model train carrying an assembly line of glowing LED lights. It moves around the gallery space in a repetitive circle, evoking grim memories of those transported by train to concentration camps during World War II.
Other installations, such as Arrow of Time (Unfinished Life), are more meditative in nature. Viewers are invited to recline on cushions and gaze up at a ceiling of twinkling red light counters. Each artwork is lit in a palette of the primary colors blue, red, green, and white, to symbolize such concepts as sky, fire, nature, and enlightenment.
For an exhibition that dwells on mortality, the exhibition is strangely uplifting, It provokes engagement and contemplation; with the luminous installations ultimately reflecting life’s continuity in its infinite cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.