Every year Sydney International Art Series brings international art stars to the Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
This summer, the MCA’s blockbuster international exhibition is a major survey of Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima, titled Connect With Everything and curated by in-house chief curator Rachel Kent.
Who is Tatsuo Miyajima?
Born in 1957 in Tokyo, Tatsuo Miyajima is one of Japan’s pre-eminent artists (he represented his country at the 1999 Venice Biennale, for example), with a career of more than three decades, spanning performance, sculpture, installations, paintings and works on paper.
What does he care about?
The themes Miyajima grapples with are no less than time, change, mortality and chance.
The artist turned to Buddhism in his early twenties, and its philosophy underpins much of his work. As he tells curator Rachel Kent in an interview for the exhibition catalogue, “[Buddhism] clarified for me that I was making art for people, not for art. That was an important moment for me and gave me a new perspective.”
But before that, a childhood illness also lead to a heightened awareness of – and preoccupation with – issues of mortality.
Miyajima lists three concepts that form a “thesis for what a human life is” that is central to his work: firstly, “everything changes; nothing stays the same”; secondly, “everything is related to everything else”; and thirdly, “everything is perpetual and eternal.”
MCA curator Rachel Kent says,“[Tatsuo’s work] is very humanist in theme – it’s all about us as individuals and as communities, and how we continue and survive in the face of enormous change, complexity and catastrophe.”
His work
Miyajima started as an oil painter, transitioned into performance, and then decided to put “performing objects” at the centre of his work rather than his own body.
During a walk through Akihabara (Tokyo’s electronics district) in the 1980s, he happened upon “counter gadgets” made from light-emitting diodes (or LEDs), and realised he could customise them and integrate them into his work – this realisation formed his core aesthetic: the LED counter, cycling through numbers from 9-1. Often presented en masse in his installations, the LED counters tend to run at different speeds, meaning that some reach the ‘end’ of their cycle more quickly than others – not unlike human lives.
Other things to look out for in his work are use of colour, which is very deliberate and symbolic, with cultural and religious meanings. “People who paint always study chromatics [and] colour theory,” says Miyajima.
Three works to understand
1. Mega Death (1999)
Miyajima describes this installation as “my critique of 20th century history.” Presented at the Venice Biennale 1999, the work surveyed the mass killings of the past century as the world stood poised on the edge of the next millennium.
The wall installation is comprised of LED counters cycling from 9-1 (representing the life of man), followed by a ‘black out’ moment that represents zero (death) – then back to 9, and so on. At certain impossible-to-predict moments the lights simultaneously black-out, representing the loss of innocent lives – before beginning their cycles again.
For Miyajima, blue is “a special colour. I see it very much as representing the ‘infinite’.”
2. 100 Time Lotus (2008)
Like an indoor lap pool for goldfish, this 20-metre ‘pond’ contains 100 white diodes, ten goldfish (all different colours and shapes) and five lotus plants. When they flower, you’ll see these are white lotuses, a flower that represents a key point on the Buddhist’s pathway to enlightenment.
Kent writes in her catalogue note: 100 is a significant number in Buddhist thought, used to express ‘the all’ of the universe. Coupled with the lotus – symbol of wisdom and purity – it is one of the artist’s most striking works and a serene counterpoint to the melancholy that pervades his memorial pieces.
Fun fact:the fish had to be cleared by the RSPCA. There are special filters in the pond, a feeding regime, and a plan to re-home them once the exhibition closes.
3. Arrow of Time (Unfinished Life) (2016)
The most recent work in the exhibition (direct from its premiere as part of the Met Breuer’s inaugural exhibition, in New York), this installation takes its title from the scientific concept of linear time. Audiences are encouraged to sit on the floor beneath the red-lit LED counters and experience “time coming at them.”
“It’s an attempt to get people to consider the passage of time in their own lives” says Miyajima.
Kent describes the experience as “like a beautiful cosmic meteor shower.”
Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect with Everything opens November 3.
Check out our hit list of the best exhibitions in Sydney.