In January, the National Art Center in Tokyo celebrated its 10th anniversary. As a commemoration, it presented the museum activities of the past ten years in the Special Exhibition Gallery room, which was superimposed with a large-scale installation Forest of Numbers – the symbolization of the next 10 years to come. Used without any partition walls for the first time, the 2,000 sqm White Cube exhibition room acts as a canvas for the installation which becomes the largest artwork of Emmanuelle Moureaux.

The installation visualizes the decade of the future from 2017 to 2026, created a sense of stillness across the large exhibition space. More than 60,000 pieces of suspended numeral figures from 0 to 9 are regularly aligned in three-dimensional grids. A section is removed, created a path that cut through the installation, invited visitors to wonder inside the colorful forest filled with numbers. The installation is composed of 10 layers which are the representation of 10 years time. Each layer employs 4 digits to express the relevant year such as 2, 0, 1, and 7 for 2017, which are randomly positioned on the grids. As part of Moureaux’s 100 colors series of installations, the layers are colored in 100 shades of colors, created a colorful time travel through the forest.

Two girls and one cat were hidden inside the colorful forest, inviting visitors to find them. In concert with the installation, the compilation of exhibition posters from the last ten years fills the wall on the right, and the opposite wall across the room simply expresses the next ten years with white numbers.