HONG KONG.- Pace is presenting Penumbra, a solo exhibition of new and recent work by Mika Tajima, at its Hong Kong gallery.
On view from October 31 to December 21, this is Tajima’s first-ever solo show in Hong Kong, presenting a holistic view of her multidisciplinary practice through four bodies of work.
Marked by its scientific and philosophical rigor, Tajima’s work across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance often takes up questions of identity and agency in a world increasingly influenced and mitigated by technology. At the center of the artist’s practice are her investigations of the ways that different digital and aesthetic technologies manifest as intertwined material, perceptual, and psychic experiences. She is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among other major institutions, and in 2024 she mounted two solo exhibitions in New York, at Pace Gallery and the Hill Art Foundation.
In her show in Hong Kong, Tajima presents works from four of her most established series, including her Art d'Ameublement paintings, Pranayama and Anima sculptures, and Negative Entropy textiles. The exhibition’s title, Penumbra, refers to the marginal, indefinite space of partial illumination or the imperfect shadow between full shadow and full light. For Tajima, this phenomenon is connected to the mercurial nature of perception and nuance, and the fluid entanglement of control and freedom. Together, the artworks on view in her presentation with Pace explore existential questions about human agency through transfigurations of colors, forms, and energies.
Among the highlights in Penumbra are seven ambient paintings from Tajima’s celebrated Art d'Ameublement series, which is named for composer Erik Satie’s Furniture Music (Musique d’ameublement)—a series of infinitely repetitive compositions conceived to be background music. In these works, airborne paint pigment is applied to the interior surfaces of glossy, transparent acrylic shells using an industrial spray gun, creating vivid and radiant color gradients. Engaging with the idea that paintings can function as backdrops onto which viewers designate context, these reflective works invite us into their misty depths, coded by our associations with transitional colors. Each of the paintings in this series is subtitled with the name of a far-flung, deserted island, a gesture that draws on individual psycho-geographic impressions and all that is unreachable, existing in the vast space of the psyche and the imagination.
Textile paintings from Tajima’s ongoing Negative Entropy series—a body of work that featured prominently in her recent solo exhibition, Energetics, at Pace in New York—will also figure in Penumbra. For some of these textiles, Tajima has worked with neurosurgeons specializing in repairing the brain through energetic stimulation and activation. Auditory registers of the brain’s activity are translated into visual representations of sound waves (spectrograms) to which the artist assigns colors. As counterparts to the minute, invisible energy pulses of an individual’s brain, other works in this series represent dynamic audio recordings of a massive excavation by thousands of workers for a colossal new development in Tokyo. In the Negative Entropy series, the artist contends with what is captured, preserved, concealed, and lost in the translation of ephemeral energy into material form, a process that speaks to the relationships between individual agency, humanity, globalization, and the rise of big data.
The exhibition in Hong Kong also includes Tajima’s glass Anima sculptures and her rose quartz Pranayama sculptures. The works in both these series—whose titles refer to the breath, life force, or spirit—are pierced through with bronze or glass nozzles cast from Jacuzzi jets. The nozzle placements are based on diagrams of bodily pressure points for acupuncture treatment, a traditional wellness technique used to control and direct unknowable life force. For Anima, Tajima uses mouth-blown glass, a transformational material existing as liquid and solid. With her new small-scale rose quartz Pranayama sculptures, she taps into the material’s piezoelectric capabilities, its ability to keep time, and its mystical associations for energy healing.
Concurrent with her exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong, Tajima is presenting work in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, a group show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles organized as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide initiative.
