In blinking LED numbers, Tatsuo Miyajima captures life's infinite cycles and unpredictability

Installation view of Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima's solo exhibition, "Folding Cosmos," at Gallery Baton in Seoul / Courtesy of Gallery Baton

At the heart of Tatsuo Miyajima’s art lies a deceptively simple medium: digital LED counters, their numbers blinking in a silent dance.

Yet what the Japanese artist conjures from these flickering digits is far more profound, if at times abstruse — a luminous, Buddhist-inflected mediation on time and existence.

In his installations, the numbers either count down or shift randomly between 1 and 9 — but never to zero. In Western thought, the digit zero has come to symbolize nothingness, the void. Miyajima rejects that finality.

It is through these LED numerals, glowing endlessly in darkened galleries, that he physically envelops visitors in the eternal rhythm of life and death and the great cycle of time.

At his latest solo exhibition at Gallery Baton in Seoul, “Folding Cosmos,” the artist continues his spiritual exploration of life and being through two new series of works.

It’s noteworthy that both “C.T.C.S. k’in” and “Hundred Changes in Life” incorporate mirrors on their surfaces, reflecting the viewer’s body and drawing them physically into the numeral sequence.

“When the viewer sees themselves in the mirror, they’re watching both the work and themselves,” Miyajima said at the gallery. “Their life and the life of the work merge, creating a mini-cosmos.”

Tatsuo Miyajima's "C.T.C.S. k'in" series (2024) / Courtesy of Gallery Baton

In “C.T.C.S. k’in,” he weaves together the ancient Mayan conception of time with our contemporary understanding of it.

The Maya measured cosmic cycles using a base-20, or vigesimal, numeral system. Miyajima’s circular LED installations — echoing the shape of the Maya calendar — capture this way of timekeeping, yet translate it into the language of modern digital display.

And with mirrored surfaces that catch and return the onlooker’s reflection, the work collapses temporal distance, merging the here-and-now with an ancient vision of the cosmos.

As the show’s title suggests, “various layers of time, various rhythms interact and are folded into one fused cosmos,” the artist noted.

Tatsuo Miyajima's "Hundred Changes in Life — no.4" (2024) / Courtesy of Gallery Baton

Meanwhile, “Hundred Changes in Life” explores the fluid spectrum of human existence, expressing 100 emotional states to reflect life’s constant flux.

Each configuration is housed within mirrored cylinders, where the artist’s 10 digits — ranging from 1 to 9, with zero rendered as a momentary blackout — shift ceaselessly in both color and tempo. With 10 numbers and 10 hues, 100 unique combinations emerge, each suggesting a different state of being.

Their appearance is entirely unpredictable; both the number and the color are determined by chance.

Tatsuo Miyajima's "Changing Life with Changing Circumstance 01" (2023) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

This embrace of ungoverned randomness stems in part from Miyajima’s fascination with quantum theory. In the quantum realm, where subatomic particles defy classical logic, certainty dissolves and probability reigns.

So, too, he suggests, does human experience — and the essence of art.

“People often think that art is entirely under the artist’s control,” he mused. “But artworks are not self-contained. They are transformed infinitely by the viewer and the world around them. And when viewers — who are themselves ever-changing — encounter a piece that appears probabilistically infinite, the result is near-total unpredictability.”

“Folding Cosmos” runs through June 28 at Gallery Baton.