Tatsuo Miyajima
Lisson Gallery, London
21 January - 5 March 2005
"Everything changes.Everything keeps going on forever.Everything is interacted with each other."Tatsuo Miyajima"Tatsuo Miyajima is one of the most significant artists to have emerged during the tumultuous late 1980's, as part of an overall transformation within contemporary art from and expressionist paradigm to one more closely related to the conceptual orientation of the artwork. In purely historical terms, Miyajima's importance as a key figure is linked to the totality with which he embraced a very simple methodology, counting, to express his ideas about a profound and elusive subject, time...Far from fetishising the role of technology in daily life, [he] invites us to see through its illusions and to construct for ourselves a more sceptical attitude towards the ways in which time is experienced."(Dan Cameron, The Place of Time, text for catalogue of Artsonje Museum in Seoul, Korea, 2002)
Beginning with number one (Miyajima never employs zero) he continues with endless counting using a network of digital LED devices and mirrored surfaces.
"He has understood the profound and dramatic sense of the temporal continuum, its numerical progression that tends toward infinity, since it is outside the reach of the circumstantial existence of the individual...What never fails to appear is the pause, the interstice that separates the number, and that lets it advance towards the future." (Achille Bonito Oliva, The Deluge of Time, Painting and Numbers on the Surface of Art)
Though not strictly associated with any one generation, historical comparisons could be made not only with On Kawara in particular, but also to Fontana, Beuys and Mondrian. These references, evident throughout his ouevre, make him a "fluid bridge between East and West,...philosophy and technology, painting and installation, performance and social event."
"In the end, Tatsuo Miyajima's is the painting of time on the surface of space." (ibid.)
Born in Tokyo in 1957, TATSUO MIYAJIMA lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan. His works are found in collections of some of the most prestigious museums throughout the world and have been shown in venues such as the Venice Biennale (1988 and 1999), the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1991), the Guggenheim Museum of New York (1995), the International Centre for Contemporary Art, Montreal (1997) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1997). Recent exhibition will includes a one-person show at MARCO, Rome (May 2004).
LISSON GALLERY
52-54 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA
www.lisson.co.uk
