Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima is a uniquely materialistic Buddhist. This might sound like a contradiction in terms, but Miyajima's fascination with what he describes as "performance objects", almost always featuring the type of seven segment numeric displays you can easily find in digital clocks, is rooted in some of the most profound existential questions raised by the Buddhist philosophy.
As Rachel Kent, Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, explains, Miyajima's preferred medium is subtle in its spirituality and yet, in many respects, a very logical expression of Buddhist thinking. "When people first approach his work they will, of course, notice the use of technology and this has an obvious synergy with aspects of Japanese culture. But Tatsuo's work is essentially humanist at its heart," Kent says. "It's about lived experience and the preparation for death, but as it is infused with Buddhist teachings, this is an exploration of a cycle: there's life, there's death, there's regeneration. You find many numbers in Tatsuo's work but you will rarely see a zero - the ultimate end."
As the MCA prepares to open the most significant survey of Miyajima's career ever mounted in Australia, Kent has had the "challenging but also surprising" task of curating a collection which features work across a vast spectrum of scale. Paintings and drawings share the show with vast installations that surround the viewer in a microcosm of Miyajima's design. These are by no means the largest examples of Miyajima's oeuvre - one of his recently completed projects occupies the outer walls of Hong Kong's tallest skyscraper - but the powerful, immersive effect of the room-sized pieces in the MCA's showcase reveal how culturally transcendent this artist's work is. "These are visually stunning works but they're also very emotionally accessible," Kent notes. "Their spiritual and philosophical qualities are very meditative. I think he [Tatsuo] would say they are about how one should live one's life."
"He was mainly interested in performance art, but he began to question the function of art and artists in the world. Who and what was art for?"
The use of numbers and "counting gadgets" is an idee fixe found throughout Miyajima's canon, tapping his fascination with renewal, recycling and the immutability of time. Other works acknowledge a polarity between the man-made and the natural, using materials like water, wood and coal (eight tonnes of it in fact) to link these abstract concepts to "the stuff of our planet".
Kent's approach has avoided any conspicuous chronology in the sequence of the exhibition, but nonetheless, there is a candid personal history enshrined in Miyajima's work that speaks to the evolution of a creative practice spanning almost three decades. A childhood dogged by ill-health gave him an early preoccupation with mortality that would eventually have a direct influence on the development of his work during his 20s. "He had what I guess you would call a spiritual crisis," Kent shares. "At that time he was mainly interested in performance art, but he began to question the function of art and artists in the world. Who and what was art for? What was its impact and how was that recognised or quantified? It was around this time that he began to study Buddhism very deeply and this had a seismic impact on both his work and his understanding of himself as an artist."
In addition to refocusing his artistic output, giving rise to the technology-rich sculptures and installations that are now his signature, his burgeoning Buddhist consciousness also radically shifted his thinking on the role of the viewer in relation to his work. Rather than merely passive observers, Miyajima considers them active participants, whose emotional and psychological responses are vital elements in his art. This is powerfully displayed in one of the MCA show's crowning exhibits: Mega Death.
Created in 1999 as a response to the 20th century, Kent believes this work — perhaps more than any other — offers an important insight into the compassion and empathy that underpin Miyajima's creative process. "You might assume, given the amount of technology in his work, that his reaction to the past century would be inspired by the information age or the automation of industry. But when Tatsuo cast his eye back across the past hundred years, he saw cycles of death on an unimaginable industrial scale, brought about by human agency," Kent says. "It's a response to the history of the atomic bomb and its relationship to Japan, but also the holocaust and the horrors of modern warfare. It's a work that acknowledges that when someone's life is snatched away, you have also robbed that person of their right to die, their right to their correct time of death." This might sound oppressively bleak, but as Kent explains, Miyajima's intention is far from morbid. "There is a memorial quality that runs through much of his work which is rather beautiful, even uplifting. It's a statement about redemption because it also recognises humanity's resilience and our ability to revive, get back up and continue forwards."
The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect With Everything, 3 Nov 2016 to 5 Mar 2017.
