MIKA TAJIMA
Born in Los Angeles (US) in 1975, Tajima received her degree in East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr University (PA) in 1997 and earned her master’s degree from Columbia University, School of the Arts in 2003. In the early stages of her career, Tajima formed “New Humans”, an artist group that presented installations and other artworks with musicians and performers. She creates works that incorporate elements from physics and technology, aiming to arrive at a cultural anthropological answer. The “Negative Entropy” series, which can be said as Tajima’s representative work of recent years, is a Jacquard-woven portrait based on the graphics data obtained by analyzing the spectrogram of sound sources recorded by Tajima herself in various places and environments. The Jacquard loom is also known as the inspiration for the punch cards (binary code) of early computer programming. Another significant work by Tajima is “Art d'Ameublement (Furniture Art)”, which was inspired by E. Satie's furniture music. Despite aiming for an existence of art which occurs suddenly as if in furniture, the fine colored particles sprayed by the industrial sprayer are trapped in an acrylic case. Although being moved by the beauty which looks like a sculpture of one end of the rainbow, it in fact prompts the viewers to contemplate the relationship between emotions and these synthetic colors which are created by extremely artificial techniques. Tajima’s creative process is interdisciplinary, transforming inspirations from human interactions, environments, life, and technology into artworks. She can be described as an artist who pursues creativity that emerges in the middle field of knowledge. Many of her works are in the collections of major institutions in the USA where she is based, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc. Tajima has also been presenting her works at many major international exhibitions, such as the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), and Whitney Biennale (New York).