ART CITIES: London-Mika Tajima

Mika Tajima’s artistic practice investigates how psychic and bodily energies are shaped, regulated, and transformed within the structures of technocapitalism. Through sculpture, painting, video, and installation, her works examine how control systems—whether architectural, ergonomic, or algorithmic—condition the lived experience of the body and mind. At once sensorial and conceptual, Tajima’s art creates heightened encounters that reveal the tension between immaterial forces and tangible form, immersing viewers in the dynamics of power, agency, and affect.

By Efi Michalaarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

“Anthesis”, Mika Tajima’s solo exhibition featuring new and recent works, including the debut of a major new body of work, “Negentropica”. The exhibition also brings together paintings and sculptures from her ongoing series “Art d’Ameublement”, “Negative Entropy” and “Pranayama”, marking the artist’s latest explorations into energy, invisible forces, and the conditions of selfhood in a networked age. For nearly twenty years, Tajima has developed a multidisciplinary practice that materializes abstract systems of regulation and performance. Moving fluidly between painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, her works translate extensive theoretical research into sensorially charged forms, foregrounding three recurring concepts: control, freedom, and performance. The exhibition’s title, “Anthesis—the botanical term describing the moment a flower reaches full bloom—suggests both expressive intensity and inevitable transience. Tajima mobilizes this state of becoming as a metaphor for human experience within systems that seek to measure, prolong, and regulate life. Her works often employ acts of recording, transformation, and containment—strategies that reveal the fragility of presence while confronting the human desire to resist entropy and natural decline. At the exhibition’s core are two new sculptures, “Negentropica 1” and “Negentropica 2” (both 2025). Each features iris flowers embedded within carved cavities of black marble boulders, their natural decay chemically slowed. Bathed in ultraviolet light, the blossoms emit an otherworldly glow that destabilizes the limits of human perception. Here, the fleeting temporality of organic life collides with the geologic permanence of stone, drawing attention to the larger forces of extraction and manipulation—from mining practices that transform landscapes to bioengineering technologies that aim to extend life itself. The term “negentropy”—the inverse of entropy—refers to the creation of order and structure within a system. Tajima deploys this concept as both a scientific principle and a metaphor for artistic transformation. By juxtaposing different temporal registers—geologic, organic, technological—these works unsettle how we perceive time and vitality. As the artist reflects: “To the flower, our years would stretch into near-geological time; to us, the flower is fleeting—intense and beautiful, then gone.” Other works on view expand upon this meditation on energy and transience. Four new pieces from the “Negative Entropy” series (2010–present) present woven spectrograms of captured sound. Drawn from two divergent recording sites—an industrial facility producing data-storage devices and a sound bath meditation—the works stage a dialogue between technological precision and embodied resonance. The tension between these sonic landscapes underscores how energy flows are harnessed, codified, and experienced across domains of production and spirituality. Two rose quartz sculptures from Tajima’s “Pranayama” series also appear in the exhibition. Pierced with bronze nozzles modeled on Jacuzzi jets, these works invoke both ancient breath-control practices and contemporary wellness technologies. The stone’s piezoelectric properties, combined with acupuncture point markings, evoke invisible currents of bodily and environmental energy. In this way, the sculptures bridge seemingly disparate traditions—yogic disciplines and technocratic optimization—revealing how both seek to regulate and reshape life’s interior flows. Completing the exhibition, works from the “Art d’Ameublement” series reinterpret the idea of ambient form. Borrowing its title from Erik Satie’s “musique d’ameublement”—infinitely looping background compositions—these paintings are made by spraying atomized pigment onto thermoformed transparent shells. The resulting gradients shimmer like atmospheric fields, simultaneously reflective and porous. Each painting bears the name of a remote or deserted island, evoking sites of longing, estrangement, and imaginative drift. The surfaces themselves become psychic membranes, absorbing and refracting the viewer’s projections while offering moments of immersion and resonance. Together, the works in “Anthesis” embody Tajima’s ongoing inquiry into the thresholds of perception, vitality, and control. At once scientific and sensorial, the exhibition underscores the paradoxes of living in a world where both bodies and environments are continuously quantified, optimized, and transformed. By staging encounters between the fleeting and the enduring, the natural and the engineered, Tajima opens a space where fragility and power, impermanence and order, coexist in a state of luminous tension.

Photo: Mika Tajima, Anima 18, 2021 Glass, cast bronze jet nozzles, 33 x 49.5 x 35.6 cm, © Mika Tajima, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 3/9-4/10/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/