Tatsuo Miyajima: Modern Humans | In conversation with Emily Steer – Present Space

7 May 2025

Tatsuo Miyajima’s commanding installations bring cutting-edge technology together with ancient philosophies. His works challenge key concepts that are woven throughout contemporary life, from time to mortality and the nourishment of the human spirit. While they reflect on traditional practices such as Buddhism, his pieces feel future facing, often drenching rooms in richly saturated blue or red light and employing LED screens.

Since the 1980s, Miyajima’s works have captured the rapid speed of contemporary technological development and the impact that this has on the world and our relation to one another. For his early performance and video pieces, the artist stood and yelled in busy Tokyo shopping areas. He hoped to shock the surrounding crowds, and observed their subsequent movements, as they often quickly diverted away from him. He also began to experiment with the Junk Art movement, utilising used goods and garbage for gallery installations. He was drawn to the mechanics of the pieces he collected, later streamlining to LED when he moved to a small studio space in Tokyo, Japan in 1987.

Many Lives, his spring solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York (on show until 19 April), delves into the cycle of life and death through four new series: Many Lives, Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, MUL.APIN’, and Hundred Changes in Life. Together, these pieces explore the Japanese concept of Seimei, which encompasses life, being and consciousness. Some works play with his repeated countdown format, showing full colour LEDs in a constant cycle of nine to one that evoke a rhythmic rebirth over and over. Shifting colours, speeds and patterns across the works speak to the experience of individuality within a larger, interconnected structure.

Read the full conversation with Emily Steer for Present Space here.

Photo by Andy Jackson, © Present Space.