'Tatsuo Miyajima: Being Coming' opens at Minsheng Museum in Shanghai

18 May 2019

On Saturday 18 May, Tatsuo Miyajima will open his largest solo exhibition to date at Shanghai’s Minsheng Museum. ‘Tatsuo Miyajima: Being Coming’ presents works from the past 3 decades of Miyajima’s career in the context of a ‘post-radical’ moment that followed the permeation of radical political ideas throughout Japan in the 1960s and ‘70s. Through his works that all stem from a set of core artistic concepts - ‘Keep Changing. Connect with Everything. Continue Forever’ - Miyajima has pursued the use of contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, computers and LED counters since the 1980s, with consistent influence from traditional Japanese ways of thinking, predominantly Zen Buddhism. The exhibition at Minsheng Museum illustrates an ‘in-between’, or Japanese ‘Ma’, state, in which notions of traditional culture and modernity are in constant play and conflict.

Amongst iconic bodies of work from 1988 onward, ‘Being Coming’ features new pieces including performance work ‘Counter Voice in Chinese Ink’ (2019), and a specially commissioned 12 metre-tall ‘Time Waterfall’, the first work in this series to be entirely free-standing. The four-sided structure is covered with LED ‘digits’ that fall downward across the panels and count down the numbers 1 to 9, a representation of the life-cycle of humans as described in Buddhist texts.

The exhibition runs until 18 August. Find more information on the Minsheng Museum website.