Tatsuo Miyajima at Kunsthalle Bielefeld
—
Kunsthalle Bielefeld’s latest exhibition, All Light. Light and Space Yesterday and Today, brings together four works from Tatsuo Miyajima’s cycle Life Face on Gold (2024) and his immersive, large-scale installation Intense Light Digit (2023). The exhibition provides insights into the development of the artistic use of light, from the visionary experiments of the 1960s to the present day.
For Life Face on Gold, Miyajima applies gold leaf to large sheets of rigid paper, repeatedly embossing the surface with the number eight, shaped like an LED digit, either in horizontal rows or in five vertical columns. Finally, individual sequences of numbers between 1 and 9 are screen-printed in white over the embossed field of eights. Since zero never appears in Miyajima’s concept, its absence becomes visible as blank pauses within the sequences, suggesting disappearances, breaths, or moments outside of time.
In Intense Light Digit, Miyajima creates an installation in which blinding light counts endlessly in total darkness, testing the threshold of human perception. The cycle moves from 0 to 9 and returns to 0 — a moment of complete blackout. Here, the illuminated digits 1–9 symbolize life, while the darkness of 0 signifies death, together forming an eternal cycle of existence and disappearance. Placed in a pitch-black room, the work alternately flood the space with radiant light or plunge viewers into invisibility, evoking cosmic vastness and isolation. The title Digit refers both to Arabic numerals and to the human finger, recalling the origins of counting and the emergence of time, space, and the fundamental duality of life and death.
At Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Miyaima's LED work enter into dialogue with the architecture, their shifting digits echoing the rhythms of perception and the body’s own pulse. Guided by his principles “keep changing, connect with everything, continue forever,” Miyajima’s installation becomes a space for reflection on continuity, mortality, and the shared flow of existence.
Participating artists: Angela Bulloch, Mary Corse, Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Mischa Kuball, Nicole Miller, Tatsuo Miyajima, Helen Pashgian.
Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Am Alten Rathaus
33602 Bielefeld, Germany