TATSUO MIYAJIMA (JAPAN, B. 1957)

Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima fuses technology with a Buddhist's appreciation for time, existence and the mutability of experience. He uses advanced technology and mathematics to convey universal concerns over life, death, and the passage of time. In the lot featured here, Changing Time with Changing Self No. 22 (Lot 118), Miyajima reduces his usual monumentally scaled sculptures to something more domestic in scale, heightening the intimacy of the relationship between the work and the viewer. A sheer, reflective black mirror surface is illuminated by a steady dance of numbers, cycling perpetually through 1 and 9. The number zero looms over the piece by its absence, and the viewer is drawn into the mesmerizing loop, marked by the light dramatic tension of that which never appears. Miyajima himself is a Buddhist, and "zero", or nothingness, or in the Buddhist idiom, "no thing", is not something that can be represented but something which must be perceived. Miyajima's works then manage to embody the profound dualities of existence. He enacts both the uniqueness of a particular moment in time and its effervescence.