Tatsuo Miyajima
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. 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.
If you own a work by Tatsuo Miyajima
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