Mika Tajima: Anthesis
Pace Gallery, London
September 3 - October 4, 2025
Negative Entropy (Sound Bath, Full Width,
Pale Lime, Quad), 2025
© Mika Tajima, courtesy Pace
Pace presents Mika Tajima: Anthesis, an exhibition of new and recent work by Mika Tajima, at its Hanover Square gallery in London. This solo presentation, the artist’s first in London since joining the gallery’s program in 2022, debuts a new body of work, titled Negentropica.
Paintings and sculptures from Tajima’s Art d’Ameublement, Negative Entropy, and Pranayama series also feature, representing her latest investigations into energy, invisible forces, and the self in a networked age.
For almost two decades, Taijma’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, has given substance to the ideas and qualities that circumscribe human agency within our built and virtual environments. Examining three consistent concepts—of control, freedom, and performance—her work is grounded in the material and sensorial, translating extensive theoretical research into physical objects.
The exhibition at Pace takes its title, Anthesis, from the term used to describe the moment a flower reaches full bloom—when the plant is at its most functional and expressive state. Drawing on this idea, the works on view employ recording, transformation, and containment—arduous attempts to resist natural decay and simultaneously underscore impermanence. In this context, anthesis, associated with both scientific quantification and aesthetic brilliance, offers a metaphorical framework for the show, capturing possibilities of becoming and the fragility of presence.
At the center of Anthesis, two new works—Negentropica 1 and 2 (both 2025)—feature iris flowers arranged within pierced and carved black marble boulders that serve as vessels. Their decay has been chemically slowed, altering their corporeal presence; illuminated in ultraviolet (UV) light, they emit a spectral glow that likewise recasts the typical bounds of human perception. Held within the stone’s carved cavities, the transience of plant life meets the slow, dense temporality of tectonic formation. Tajima’s reconfiguration of both organic and geological elements gestures toward greater forces of human intervention: the deep, structural extraction of the earth, and contemporary attempts to prolong—or “hack”—human biology.
Negentropy—from which this body of work takes its title—refers to a system becoming more ordered and internally structured, in contrast to entropy, which describes a move toward disorder. The tensions in these works between temporal scales, nature, and technology unsettle how we perceive time, presence, and transformation. In Tajima’s words: “To the flower, our years would stretch into near-geological time; to us, the flower is fleeting—intense and beautiful, then gone.”
Four new works from the artist’s ongoing Negative Entropy series (2010–present) echo themes within Anthesis, giving form to the ephemeral through captured and preserved sound. These woven spectrograms are derived from two distinct recording sites: a production facility of the international company Buffalo Inc., which manufactures data storage and network devices, and the immersive, sensorial space of a sound bath meditation. One site is defined by industrial precision and technological control, the other by embodied experience and spiritual resonance. Their contrast reflects the divergent ways we harness, interpret, and are shaped by flows of energy and information.
Two small rose quartz sculptures from Tajima’s Pranayama series are also on view. In this body of work, the artist pierces wood, glass, or mineral surfaces with bronze nozzles cast from Jacuzzi jets, evoking the practices of physical and mental reform in both traditional wellness regimens and technocratic optimization. Titled after yogic breath practices—prāṇāyāma meaning “control of vital air” in Sanskrit—these sculptures are marked at acupuncture meridian points, referencing traditions that seek to reveal and regulate interior flows. Rose quartz, a semi-precious stone, is prized in New Age beliefs and valued for its piezoelectric properties—the ability to emit an electric charge under pressure. Gesturing toward invisible circulations of energy in bodies, objects, and spaces, these works reflect how both ancient practices and contemporary technologies aim to systematize, reform, and transform life.
Continuing this field of projection, new works from Tajima’s Art d’Ameublement series explore the idea of artworks as ambient structures onto which viewers project context and association. The series takes its name from Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement—infinitely repetitive compositions conceived as background music. In these paintings, airborne pigment is atomized and applied to the interiors of glossy, transparent, thermoformed shells using an industrial spray gun, forming vivid color gradients that shimmer like atmospheric pressure fields. These misted surfaces act as porous membranes—reflective, immersive, and resonant—inviting the viewer into their depths, coded by transitional hues and personal associations. Each work is subtitled with the name of a remote, often deserted, island suggesting psycho-geographic drift and the pull of unreachable places—spaces at once internal and expansive, where imagination meets estrangement.
PACE LONDON
5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ
Related Post:
Mika Tajima: Energic - With a biography of the artist
Pace Gallery, New York, January 12 - February 24, 2024
Upcoming exhibition at Pace London:
October 14 – November 15, 2025
