Arthub Favorite: Week 145

Tatsuo Miyajima: Being Coming

Opening: 2019 May 17th, 16:00
Duration：2019 May 18th-August 18th
Venue：Minsheng Art Museum, Building 3, No.210, Wenshui Rd, Jingan, Shanghai
Sponsor：Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum will present on May 17, 2019, Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s largest solo exhibition “Tatsuo Miyajima: Being Coming”. The public can admire the representative LED installations and performance art works of each period since 1988. Furthermore, the exhibition is going to present the new-created works specific for the show, including LED installation “Time Waterfall (2019)” and performance art “Counter Skin Face (2019)”.

In the 1980’s, Tatsuo Miyajima’s artistic career commenced. Relying on three concepts, “Keep Changing”, “Connect with Everything”, and “Continue Forever”, Tatsuo Miyajima has created a series of iconic and widely acclaimed typical works. Reviewing the radical politics permeating in Japan from the 1960s to 1970s, the curator tries to re-evaluate Miyajima’s three concepts within the genealogy of “post-radical” on the occasion of this solo exhibition. Compared with Europe, the Japanese left-wing movement lacked originality, then it no wonder quickly died out. The constant influence of the intense traditional local culture, especially the recognition of “in-between (ma, 間)”, has made it difficult for Japanese people to have the individuality in a sense of the Occidental Modernity. So, the concept of “post-radical” attempts to explain the dilemma of distressed consciousness between the occidental radical critical thoughts and the Japanese traditional “in-between (ma, 間)” thinking, found in Miyajima’s practice.

The Chinese title “如来” origins from the Sanskrit “Tathāgata”, one of the Buddha’s top ten titles. The meaning of Tathā is “如”, which means being like or unchangeable; while āgata, “来”, means coming. So, “如来” literally means “like coming” or “neither coming nor going”. “如来” emphasizes that artist’s intellectual resource is Buddhist; Moreover, the English title Being Coming, which is definitely not only the translation of Chinese title, highlights that Tatsuo Miyajima’s work is the event in sense of philosophy. It fits with Tatsuo Miyajima’s consistent creative concept of “art in you”, which actually expresses that everyone has his or her own potential to become Buddha, turned into art by Tatsuo Miyajima. Title “Being Coming” gives spectators a strong hint, which improves their interaction with the artist’s work as well as their spiritual world, both of which make everyone appreciate the vitality.

Aabout artist

Tatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Ibaraki, Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, as well as from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connect with All’, and ‘Goes on Forever’, Tatsuo Miyajima is widely known and has become a representative figure of Japanese contemporary art. Tatsuo Miyajima’s supremely technological works have centred on his use of digital light-emitting diode (LED) counters, 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. As the prominent contemporary artist in Japan, he has already had solo exhibitions in famous contemporary art museums all around the world, including Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Kunstmuseum St Gallen (Switzerland), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

About curator

SUN Qidong has been the Curator of the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum since 2014. Opened in 2008, the Minsheng Museum is considered one of the most leading public contemporary art museums in China; it is part of the Minsheng Bank, China’s first private bank to sponsor contemporary art. Since 2012 he wrote art and cultural criticism for numerous periodicals, publishing widely in art magazines in which he explored the relation between art, politics and economy. He has curated group shows over the past 5 years, including Continuous Terminus (2018), Do you wanna play with me (2015), The Non Figurative (2015), an exhibition that included interactive and immersive works by artists such as Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Enli, Zheng Guogu; he also has curated important retrospectives and solo exhibitions by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Shi Yong, Nathalie Djurberg& Hans Berg.