Tatsuo Miyajima

All over the world, Tatsuo Miyajima (born 1957) plants shoots from a Chinese Persimmon tree that survived the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki by the Americans. Equally, this is a natural counterpart to his illuminated “number works”. His led number displays repeat the numbers 1 to 9 or 9 to 1 in continuous succession.

For Miyajima, the endless repetition of the numbers is a comment on the eternal cycle of life. He avoids zero, as it is a symbol of the absolute and also of nothingness and stasis. Just as each person has their own individual lifetime, these illuminated number works also possess their own respective rhythms. Thus, numbers become a metaphor for the investigation of the fundamental questions of human existence: time and space, life and death.