宫岛达男

C.F Lifestructurism

source: lissongallery

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.’

Tatsuo 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.
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source: tateorguk

Japanese sculptor and installation artist. He finished undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986 and came to prominence in the late 1980s with installations of digital counters in the form of light-emitting diodes. He made his first counter in 1988 and subsequently retained this form as his basic building block: a large, two-digit red display, it continually counts from 1 to 99, never reaching 100 or registering zero. Often he wired together several counters together so that they triggered each other at various points; he called these groups ‘Regions’ and saw them as representing a symbolic universe. In the first half of the 1990s he produced work as part of his 133651 series: ranging from small groupings of counters to large, complex installations, each work consisted of a row of ten two-digit counters with up to five wired together. Such a unit allows a total of 133,651 combinations to appear, hence the title. The project Running Time (1994; see 1996–7 exh. cat.) showed a formal development in Miyajima’s use of the counters: here he filled a dark room with small toy cars in constant movement which kept bumping into each other, triggering the counters mounted on their roofs to reset. Although Miyajima’s work is indebted to Serial art of the 1970s and to the use of numerical systems by other artists, the artist himself spoke of his work as addressing humanist ideas within Buddhist philosophy.