Mika Tajima attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and Columbia University in New York, where she now lives. Her efforts are focused on the links between contemporary subjects and production systems organised by the devices of modern design: workspaces, institutions and recreational spaces.
Furniture Art (2013) is one of her best-known series. In it she sprays enamel paint on Plexiglas. The resulting degraded, monochrome images are linked via their titles to various geographical locations including Valencia, Hong Kong and Frankfurt. This operation is based on 'the psycho-geographic associations produced by the affective naming of colours and paints and its relationship to the rise of the immaterial economy and its ambient global flows', to quote the catalogue of the Quadrado Azul Gallery in Lisbon, where the pieces were shown in 2013. In Furniture Art, Tajima also appropriates and transforms the term Musique d’ameublement ['Furniture Music'], coined by Erik Satie in 1917 to define what became known as Muzak, i.e. that music that is always playing in the background at some locations but which no-one pays attention to.
Mika Tajima's work has been shown regularly, mainly at US venues including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut, 2017), the 11R Gallery (New York, 2016), the Kanye Corcoran Griffin (Los Angeles, 2016), the Sculpture Center (New York, 2016) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, 2015). Shows in Europe have included the Frac Nord-Pas de Calais (Dunkirk, France, 2014), the Brand New Gallery (Milan, Italy, 2013) and the South London Gallery (UK, 2011).
Mika Tajima attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and Columbia University in New York, where she now lives. Her efforts are focused on the links between contemporary subjects and production systems organised by the devices of modern design: workspaces, institutions and recreational spaces.
Furniture Art (2013) is one of her best-known series. In it she sprays enamel paint on Plexiglas. The resulting degraded, monochrome images are linked via their titles to various geographical locations including Valencia, Hong Kong and Frankfurt. This operation is based on 'the psycho-geographic associations produced by the affective naming of colours and paints and its relationship to the rise of the immaterial economy and its ambient global flows', to quote the catalogue of the Quadrado Azul Gallery in Lisbon, where the pieces were shown in 2013. In Furniture Art, Tajima also appropriates and transforms the term Musique d’ameublement ['Furniture Music'], coined by Erik Satie in 1917 to define what became known as Muzak, i.e. that music that is always playing in the background at some locations but which no-one pays attention to.
Mika Tajima's work has been shown regularly, mainly at US venues including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut, 2017), the 11R Gallery (New York, 2016), the Kanye Corcoran Griffin (Los Angeles, 2016), the Sculpture Center (New York, 2016) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, 2015). Shows in Europe have included the Frac Nord-Pas de Calais (Dunkirk, France, 2014), the Brand New Gallery (Milan, Italy, 2013) and the South London Gallery (UK, 2011).