Foreword
Taipei Fine Arts Museum is currently presenting the Ryoji Ikeda Solo Exhibition as our largescale summer exhibition, featuring a complete representation of Ryoji Ikeda's artistic output, from sound sculptures and audiovisual installations to light boxes and two-dimensional artworks. Many viewers interpret his works as purely "technological products." In actuality, his works possess an audiovisual element that shocks the psyche, a powerful quality that leads our perceptions to relinquish judgement in the moment. As the artist himself said on the day his exhibition was introduced to the media, "composition" is the core part of his art. What he does is to apply the concept of musical composition to any art form. Sometimes it is twodimensional visual art, sometimes performance. He feels that composition is abstract and difficult to describe, like piecing together building blocks in the brain, a kind of mathematical construction.
Ikeda approaches the structure of his artistic expression like a composer, yet he also applies mathematical calculation to achieve a philosophical consideration of beauty and the sublime. He stays immersed at the tangent point of mathematics, science and art, and he praises the mathematician as a classic figure who is intoxicated with beauty. For Ikeda, mathematics by its very nature has the ability to evolve from the smallest of units to an infinity of numbers.
Beauty and sublimity are awe-inspiring forces exhibited by the vast scales that transcend the boundaries of things, demonstrating their relationship to infinity. This is also the most enthralling aspect of this exhibition. Ryoji Ikeda uses mathematical methods to visually manifest the cosmos in miniature. He describes himself as a reductionist. His works reduce sound, light and the world down to sin waves, pixels and data. In his works, numbers are merely one kind of superficial manifestation, placed in his works purely to give them material form. Here, technical problems are the most insignificant issue – they are merely the artist's work. When the visitor enters the gallery, they need only understand how to listen and appreciate. Viewing each artwork is like watching a live performance.
This summer exhibition took shape as TFAM curator Jo Hsiao and guest curator Eva Lin worked with Mr. Ikeda and his team to discuss and select the works. Each work is complex, but Mr. Ikeda hopes everyone will view and listen to his works using their intuition, sensing the works by experiencing them. Through intuition, we can discover fundamental principles or very subtle things. For example, the works may change in ways that are either evident or undetectable.
Although we are not philosophers, this summer let us all appreciate the works of Ikeda intuitively and carefully, in each detail of their manifestation, from the most easily understandable to the most complex. Perhaps as the artist said: "Nothing could be more nonsensical than writing about Mozart's melodies. You simply need to listen to them to understand." Ryoji Ikeda hopes that everyone will walk through each gallery and encounter each work as if going on a journey through time and the universe.
Ping Lin/Director, Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Foreword/Ping Lin Director, Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Essays
└ Art as Cosmological Rumination: On the Ryoji Ikeda Solo Exhibition/Jo Hsiao
└ The Infinity of Sound within the Forest of Continuum/Eva Lin
Sound, Light, Data
└ A [continuum]
└ point of no return
└ code-verse
└ data.scan [nº1-9]
└ the planck universe [macro]
thought experiment #1-8
π, e, ø
test pattern series
4'33”
Time—Discreteness and Continuity
└ 4'33" [gray]
└ 4'33" [black]
└ 0'10"
Systematics
systematics [nº4-3]
systematics [nº4-4]
systematics [nº1-4]
grid system [nº1-a]
List of Works