Tatsuo Miyajima, born in Tokyo 1957, has been creating works of varied character since the 1980’s, always with notions of time and space as central themes. After a period as performance artist in the early 80’s, Miyajima has worked primarily with sculpture. Today, his hallmark is LED digits, slowly counting from 1 to 9, or 9 to 1. The constant scoring symbolizes infinite time, but the number 0 is always excluded, as Miyajima relates it to stagnation and death.
With his focus on time, Miyajima follows a Japanese tradition, in which artists such as On Kawara and Hiroshi Sugimoto can be found. Miyajima, however, does not seek to freeze time like his peers; he stretches it out before us in all its unimaginable infinity. The pieces are never completely still, and the light emitting diodes continues to shift from figure to figure, slowly but in constant motion. Time is fleeting, elusive, yet boundless.