Mika Tajima (American, b. 1975) is a New York-based artist working across sculpture, painting, media installation and performance.,,Her research-based practice examines how industrial and digital technologies condition the human body and mind, tracing labor and control from factory production lines and data centers to social media sentiment analysis.,
Tajima earned a BA in Fine Arts and East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College in 1997, the same year she was a Post-Graduate Apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and went on to an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003.,That year she also co-founded New Humans, a collaborative project with artists Eric Tsai and Howie Chen, her husband.
Her Negative Entropy series, begun in 2010, converts field recordings of production noise from textile factories and data centers into digital spectrogram images that a weaver then translates into Jacquard-loom fabric portraits.The series was shown in the Whitney Museum's 2018-19 exhibition “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018”, alongside works by Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt and Nam June Paik.,In her Art d'Ameublement paintings, begun in 2011, she reverse-sprays acrylic gradients inside vacuum-formed transparent shells and titles each work after a geographic location, referencing composer Erik Satie's furniture music.,
For her Meridian series, begun in 2016, Tajima built light sculptures from reconfigured office chairs whose glow shifts in real time with data such as the price of gold or the sentiment of social media posts from a given city.,Two Meridian works were shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2017.Her Pranayama sculptures, begun in 2017 and carved from wood, marble or rose quartz, are punctured with bronze casts of Jacuzzi jet nozzles positioned at bodily pressure points.,In 2019 Art Production Fund presented her four-channel video PSYCHO GRAPHICS, featuring a masked dancer, on digital billboards along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Tajima joined Pace Gallery in 2022. In 2024 she presented “Energetics”, her first solo show in New York in eight years, which included Sense Object, a portrait of national social-media sentiment from a single day compressed onto an optical crystal using optoelectronics technology.In 2025 she opened “Anthesis” at Pace London, introducing the Negentropica series, in which iris flowers are preserved inside ultraviolet-lit black marble boulders.Her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
