MIKA TAJIMA: PENUMBRA
Pace is pleased to present Penumbra, a solo exhibition of new and recent work by Mika Tajima, at its Hong Kong gallery.
October 31 – December 21, 2024
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.
In her current 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.
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.
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.