Selected Works & Awards

2021

11 Stories on Distanced Relationships: Contemporary Art From Japan, online, The Japan Foundation

2019

The Man Who, An Ephemeral Archive (solo), Keio University Art Center, Tokyo, Japan

2017

Welcome Back, Gordon Matta-Clark (solo), statements, Tokyo, Japan

2016

Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura (solo), Maison Hermes Le Forum, Tokyo, Japan

Na (solo), Kyoto City University of Arts Art Galler, Japan

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• 7,502,733, 2021-2022
• Photo: ToLoLo studio

Exhibition

For many years the late artist On Kawara declined to appear in public, be photographed face-on, or allow recorded interviews. At first glance, Okumura Yukiʼs video The Man Who (2019) looks like a documentary on Kawara, painting an intimate picture of the artist via interviews with nine people who knew him.

Yet not one speaker actually mentions Kawaraʼs name. In actual fact, Okumura asked all nine not only about Kawara, but also about another artist of the same era, stanley brouwn, and set a rule that no interviewee should pronounce either manʼs name. That is, the “he/him” and “the man” spoken of in the work refers sometimes to Kawara, sometimes to brouwn, depending on the anecdote. The blurring of the boundary between them is because while similarly avoiding photos of his face, and public expression of his thoughts, brouwn too turned time and space into art, using his own body as the baseline.

Taking this idiosyncratic approach, Okumura endeavors to fuse the personalities and life trajectories of these two leading contemporary artists to create another, totally new figure. Yet the nine interviewees are frank in their very real recollections of the individual artists, throwing into stark relief aspects of their characters and conduct.

Okumuraʼs clear plexiglass series (2019) takes pages from the catalogs of various exhibitions in which both Kawara and brown took part, and superimposes these pages on each other. Here too, occasionally the names of the pair merge to emerge as that of a single, mysterious artist. Or perhaps it is that the overlapping pages that though jumbled, still succeed in conveying an air of the time, also feel like an aggregate of the artists who lived through this avant-garde period.

Okumura Yuki is known for his attempts to home in on the endeavors of a specific artist while superimposing on them the body and behavior of a third party. In doing so, Okumura offers up his body and life as a medium or catalyst, an act informed by the translation work he undertakes in parallel with his art practice. His activities, reminiscent of a compound eye or parallel reality, transcend art historical concerns to also indicate the possibility of an individualʼs life being taken on and expanded by another. Other projects include The Lone Curator (2021), Welcome Back, Gordon Matta-Clark (2017), Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura (2016), and Away from the Light of Greenwich: A Close Encounter with On Kawana (2016).

Exhibition

In 1969 an exhibition was held in Seattle that had as its title the cityʼs then population: 557,087. Of particular note at this show put together by critic Lucy Lippard and featuring so-called “dematerialized” works by a large number of artists including On Kawara, was the vital role played by instructions. Rather than visiting the venue, most of the participating artists sent instructions instead, which Lippard and other local staff then executed to bring the various works to fruition.

For 7,502,733 (2021–2022), Okumura selected 30 works from 557,087 that are in line with the definition of “conceptual art” and undertook to reperform their making processes, according to the instructions, almost entirely single-handedly. His aim was not to recreate the forms of the works as material objects; rather Okumura traced the content of the instructions and the actual making process for each work, based on documentation and testimony, he himself standing in for both the artists and Lippard et al in order to output his own results. Because the procedure for making each work has also undergone subtle revisions based on Okumuraʼs own physique, personality, and circumstances, they are not mere reperformances, but as the artist states, more like “reinterpretations.”

At the time 557,087 was criticized as being more like a solo show by Lippard than what it was: a group exhibition. 7,502,733 was conceived out of a fresh reading of this critique. Because being a sole agent to take on board, beyond time and space, the instructions of those 1969 artists is also to transfer the actions and experiences of Lippard et al to oneself. What Okumura ultimately aims to achieve by reworking the actions of those 1960s practitioners is none other than to render traces of his own personal physicality and subjectivity omnipresent in the gallery space.

Okumura Yuki offers himself up as a medium or catalyst in projects that superimpose the body, behavior etc of a third party onto the endeavors of a specific artist. In doing this, he is profoundly influenced by his experience in his other occupation, that of translator.