Tatsuo Miyajima valuation
Counts from one to nine in LED, over and over, and never shows zero.
Tatsuo Miyajima was born in Tokyo in 1957 and has worked since the late 1980s almost entirely with light-emitting diodes counting from one to nine and back, each counter running at its own speed.
What a work by Tatsuo Miyajima is worth
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Bio
Tatsuo Miyajima was born in Tokyo in 1957 and has worked since the late 1980s almost entirely with light-emitting diodes counting from one to nine and back, each counter running at its own speed. Zero is never displayed, because zero would mean death; the gap between nine and one is where it goes. The three principles he states for the work — keep changing, connect with everything, continue forever — come from Buddhist thought, and the counters have appeared as room-sized grids, towers, floors of water and works in which individual people were asked to set the speed of their own counter.
These are electronic objects and that governs the market. Component obsolescence is the central issue: LEDs, drivers and controllers fail and are eventually unobtainable, so a work's maintenance history, the presence of spare components and the studio's position on replacement are all part of what is being sold. Editions are typically small and the technical specification, including the mounting and the counting parameters, forms part of the work. Prices are set principally in Hong Kong, Tokyo and London. Works on paper and prints exist in modest numbers.
Venice, the Fondation Cartier and the Kaki Tree Project
Miyajima's first solo exhibitions were Human Stone at Gallery Parergon in Tokyo in 1983 and Time at Maki Gallery in 1986. He showed at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 1999, and had solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 1996 and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997.
With the arborist Masayuki Ebinuma he began the Kaki Tree Project in the 1990s, planting saplings grown from a persimmon tree that survived the atomic bomb at Nagasaki. A version of Sea of Time for Tohoku, shown in Tokyo in 2020, was made with members of the public, who set the speeds of its counters. He is represented by Lisson Gallery and Buchmann Galerie, whose documentation records a work's specification.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
