Bio / Story / Concepts
Ricki Morse – Experiencing Tatsuo Miyajima
Time Waterfall – ICC Building, Hong Kong (video 2:01)

Tatsuo Miyajima
Japanese, 1957-

Time Waterfall-panel #12, 2018
computer graphics, LED display
132 1/4 x 25 1/8 x 12 1/2 in.

SBMA, Museum Purchase with Funds Given by an Anonymous Donor to Support and Honor the Future of the SBMA into the 21st Century
2020.1



Tatsuo Miyajima - undated photo

“Both the numbers themselves, their size and the speed they fall is completely random. It is very chaotic, very fragile. The numbers and speeds will always be different so the image you see one moment will never be seen again. If you see a pattern in a display like this, you get bored after three minutes. But when you see randomness, it is like seeing a real waterfall.” - Tatsuo Miyajima



Time Waterfall, Hong Kong, 2016, was shown across the entire façade of the city’s iconic 110 story International Commerce Center on the Kowloon harbor-front.

COMMENTS

Time Waterfall is a new work by Miyajima which aims to convey the eternal luminance of human life, expressing an ethos of 'living in the present'. The work comprises the natural numbers one to nine, which cascade down the face of the building, never reaching zero. The continuous counting down symbolizes life, while the zero implied by the extinction of light acts as a metaphor for death. Each digital number will appear in a different size and descend at its own speed, creating a number of layers so that each represents a trajectory of individual lives.

https://www.lissongallery.com/news/tatsuo-miyajima-presents-time-waterfall-during-art-basel-in-hong-kong


These numbers fall continuously, count continuously from nine to one. Zero is never shown. These numbers symbolize the lives of people. And while counting, demonstrate ‘life’ or ‘to live’. The void of zero stands for death. This cycle of life and death continues. This is a Buddhist concept (called ‘Sunya’). It demonstrates the eternity of life. Numbers continue to fall… continue to change.”

http://n4mb3rs.com/tatsuo-miyajima-numbers/


Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computer systems, Tatsuo Miyajima (born 1957, Japan) creates supremely technological works centered on his use of LED counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious cycles from 1 up to 9 or from 9 down to 1, represent the journey from birth to death, the finality of which is symbolized by ‘0’, the void or zero point, which consequently never appears in his work.

Time Waterfall is a new work by Miyajima in which numbers tumble randomly and incessantly for eternity, with the different sizes of the numerals and varying speeds of descent representing the trajectory of individual lives within that continuum. The work presented in EVERYTHING AT ONCE is a sculptural realization of Miyajima’s Time Waterfall, first created for the facade of a Hong Kong skyscraper, produced for the International Convention Centre commission in March 2016.

https://everythingatonce.com/2017/10/17/tatsuo-miyajima/

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Inspired by his Buddhist practice, Tatsuo Miyajima transforms today’s technology into glowing works of art that evoke profound experiences of being, space and time. Time Waterfall-panel #12 belongs to a series of structures that resemble an architectural column or sculpture relief. Miyajima worked with computer scientists to program a sequence of numbers resembling LEDs (light-emiting diodes) that count at different speeds from 9 to 1 as they descend in an unpredictable order around the column’s two corners and three sides.

To Miyajima, the sequence 9 to 1 symbolizes the cyclical nature of energy, time, and life itself. Here, 9 to 1 denotes energy slowing down but never expiring as the numbers ceaselessly cascade downward like an actual waterfall. Significantly, zero is absent. To Miyajima, zero represents death, and, as death is, by definition, outside lived human experience, zero cannot represent any kind of life force. Central to Miyajima’s art, this idea of life force is also present in

Keep Changing,
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Continue Forever.

- Park Projects, 2020