Mika Tajima talks about her passion for technology and health

“Even the unnatural is natural” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote at the end of the 18th century:Number While Goethe could never have predicted our technologically insatiable modern world, his centuries-old words take on new resonance when considering the work of multidisciplinary artist Mika Tajima.

The artist, who joined Pace Gallery in 2022, creates data-inspired, medium-skilled works that question what it means to “act naturally” in the modern era, and how technology has reshaped our inner lives in a culture obsessed with self-optimization.

Installation view: Mika Tajima: SupernaturalHillart Foundation, May 3 – July 26, 2024. © Hillart Foundation. Photo: Matthew Herman.

“What defines our identity beyond our physical presence?” Tajima asked me during a visit to his Brooklyn studio this spring. “Technology has made us virtual beings, and our identity is not just this you, standing in front of me. The way we exist in different places is different from our inner private self, our inner world. In fact, the outer world shapes us.”

Tajima incorporates a variety of materials into her studies: in her studio, large-scale abstract woven pieces are displayed next to enormous beaded rose quartz crystals.Her works, which include russet jacuzzi nozzles, hydrotherapy tubs in eye-popping gradient hues, and blown-glass sculptures, are visualizations of the data she collects, Tajima explains, and often embody the invisible forces, sources, and stimuli that influence our lives..

“In my work, I often use physics and technology as metaphors for our lived experiences and how technology and techno-capitalism are shaping our world,” she explained. “And what does all this mean for the individual now? Where is our agency?”

Installation view: Mika Tajima: SupernaturalHillart Foundation, May 3 – July 26, 2024. © Hillart Foundation. Photo: Matthew Herman.

The current exhibition “Supernatural” at the Hill Art Foundation in New York (until July 26th) features a wide selection of works from Tajima’s recent series. The centrepiece of the exhibition is new work from Tajima’s woven painting series, Negative Entropy. This ongoing series of works uses fragments of auditory spectrograms, which Tajima cuts out and assigns colours to. The piece was created at the Textile Lab in the Netherlands, one of the few facilities with looms large enough to realize Tajima’s vision on a large scale. For “Supernatural,” Tajima created the largest piece in the series, ” Negative Entropy (Inscape, Breathing Exercise, full width, burgundy, hex) (2024).

“I call these works sonic portraits.“It’s a visualization of audio recordings of specific places, experiences, locations and people,” she explained. “For this show, I based the work on recordings of sound bath meditations, and the spectrogram transformation of those moments became an architectural-scale weaving that fills the foundation’s enormous walls.”

The exhibition also includes her work. Pranayama Monolith – A rose quartz creation that combines ancient healing properties with a modern jacuzzi; Her blown glass sculptures Anima and mirror While the series alludes to the forms of body braces and prosthetic limbs, it is ultimately formed through the accidental interplay of materiality with other works.

This large-scale exhibition follows Tajima’s first solo exhibition, “Energies,” held at the Pace Gallery in New York in January and February of this year. The exhibition will be Tajima’s first in New York since joining the gallery in 2022. The show is centered around Tajima’s large textile paintings from his “Negative Entropy” series, which neuroscientists created based on spectrograms of patients’ brain activity in response to various stimuli. It also featured artworks that appeal to the sense of smell and other senses. The show was also the first public showing of Tajima’s work in New York since it was shown at SculptureCenter in 2016. MeridianIt’s a light sculpture that adapts in real time to the collective mood on Twitter for a particular geographic region.

Tajima’s career has recently been on track with several upcoming exhibitions and a dedicated collector base. “Mika’s projects continue to grow ambitiously, with her latest development being the expansion of one of her cornerstone series, Negative Entropy, into a large-scale architectural centerpiece. We are pleased to announce the sale of this incredible work from the Hill Art Foundation to a highly distinguished private foundation,” said Colleen Grennan, Senior Director at Pace Los Angeles. “With upcoming shows in London and Hong Kong, her international recognition will skyrocket.”

Now, this is In autumn, Tajima’s work will be on display at the “I breathe)” Curated Group Exhibition Mika Yoshitake Pacific Standard Time’s Glenn Kaino has put together an exhibition at the Hammer that focuses on climate change and social justice and how they intersect with art.

For Tajima, artistic and scientific contemplation is a natural extension of a lifelong interest. As an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, the artist became passionate about printmaking, which she felt was the broadest course of study available to her: “Painting and sculpture were too direct for me. I wanted to make installations with mechanical production, repeated through industrial processes. I was interested in the mechanization of image-making.” These interests dovetailed with Bryn Mawr’s emphasis on feminist education and identity.

“Through that education, I began to question power and structures,” she said. Ultimately, these interests led her to the intersection of architecture, modernism, and capitalism, and they continue to drive her work today.

But for Tajima, the impact of technology is not inherently negative, and she says her work is not dogmatic.

“How do we transcend things that try to be restrictive, limiting, limiting or categorical,” she says. “Technology is in some ways an enhancement, an aid. Whether it’s a constraint, a prosthesis or an aid, you have to find that balance of power for yourself. My relationship with technology, like most people’s, is complicated.”

In these challenging geopolitical times, Tajima sees immersion, both in scale and experience, as a way to celebrate our physical, lived experience. On July 12th, a live techno sound bath will be held in the exhibition space, Experimental musician Darren Ho: Visitors can lie down on yoga mats in the exhibition and immerse themselves in his compositions.

She hopes that the experience of being surrounded by Tajima’s gigantic new work will give audiences a sense of the sublime.

“The large scale “The experiential sense of something beyond myself, the deep contemplative sense that I have to be there to experience it, the sense that there is something special, unique, particular about my experience and existence,” she says. “It gives me a sense of scale and agency in an age of big data and geopolitics. There’s a contradiction larger than life. I’m just a small person, but what I’m experiencing can be huge.”

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