OKUMURA Yuki
OKUMURA Yuki
update: 2013.6.1
Profile
Born 1978. PhD at Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, 2012. Solo shows and screenings including "Anatomy Fiction - rakugo version," MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, 2010, and "Jun Yang: A Short Lecture on Forgetting and Remenbering," Joshibi University of Art and Design Art-Center Prep-Room, Kanagawa, and Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Aichi. Group shows including "Fuyu no tabi," Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, 2012, and "The Vision of Contemporary Art 2012," The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, 2012. Made in collaboration with a Rakugo performer, an interpreter, etc., his recent projects focus on how speeches using the first person can generate surreal situations. Okumura himself is a translator, as well as a writer both under his real name and a pen name Lei Yamabe, whose essays include "On Kawara's Quantum Gravitational Body, or the Confinement of Space-Time and the Liberation of Consciousness," printed in "On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities," 2012.
About works / performance
We all have unique names. My name is Yuki Okumura, but yours is not. At the same time, we share "I," the first person. This spooky word does not always indicate a specific person, but the person who speaks, in each case. Through the parallel usage of absoluteness of different names and context-dependency of the same personal pronoun, a certain self is indivisibly connected to a certain body, so that an individual person is made possible. In other words, it is just a system, and it is in fact fragile. Designing situations where names or the first person malfunctions, as well as critically examining their ranges, my practice can be said to be an attempt to realize an alternative reality by activating flexibility and multiplicity that are actually latent in the interrelation between self and body.
