The Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima has a lot to live up to with his large-scale light installation Time Waterfall, which will illuminate the 118-storey International Commerce Centre (ICC) building in Hong Kong’s harbour.
The annual light show, commissioned by Art Basel and the ICC, is a high point in the city’s art calendar. Last year, the Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei stopped city dwellers in their tracks with her work Same Old, Brand New, which included icons from 1980s video games such as Pac-Man.
But Miyajima is not fazed. Since the late 1980s, he has made ambitious and dazzling works, such as Mega Death (1999), a monumental wall studded with 2,400 LED counters, and Hoto (2008), a huge mirrored pagoda. “The ICC project is on a giant scale, but I’ve never been intimidated by the scale of a project. What I am always concerned with is quality, which has nothing to do with the scale,” he says.
The ICC installation furthers his use of LED as a source of light—his trademark medium. “I like the way LEDs are illuminated, and I like the quality of its light. I have no other way but to continue using it, as I have not encountered anything better,” he says.
Miyajima, who lives and works
in Ibaraki, Japan, is planning another “gigantic installation” in the north-eastern Tohoku region of Japan, entitled Sea of Time in Tohoku.
“I wish to make this work as a prayer and requiem for those who lost their life in the [Fukushima] earthquake and tsunami five years ago. This will be a participatory project with bereaved families. I wish to construct a building on a hill, looking over the sea and the deceased spirits,” he says.
In Hong Kong, the numbers one to nine run down the face of the ICC but never reach zero, and the digits, in varying sizes, fall at different speeds. For Miyajima, numerals constitute an abstract language that can be universally appreciated. “Numbers in my work are abstracted to a pure state, not indicating any quantity whatsoever, and have no comparative to the original. That’s how these numbers can represent life,” he says.
Crucially, the work is an elegiac metaphor for existence. “All people live until their death, and life is about this whole stream of time. Time is irreversible,” Miyajima says. Time Waterfall reflects his long-held theories derived from the teachings of Buddhism, which feed into his core artistic concepts: Keep Changing, Connect with Everything and Continue Forever.
His Connect with Everything thesis encompasses the following ideal: “Art has long been isolated from the real world, and spoiled within a framework of the
‘art world’.” But what does that mean? “For a long time, art has been described in a particular vocabulary and valued within
the closed circle of the art world,” he says. “But today, it no longer solely belongs in the hands of top intellectuals. In this case, artists should go beyond boundaries, making connections to all possible fields and acting upon society. I believe that art should have the potential to inform and reform society.”