MISAKO & ROSEN is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with artist Yuki Okumura. Okumura, a graduate of the MFA program of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (2004) and frequent participant in international residency programs including, most recently, that of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin as well as the Laboratorie Village Nomade, La Corbiere, Switzerland (both 2007) previously participated in a two-person exhibition with artist Will Rogan at MISAKO & ROSEN (2007). Within Japan, Okumura’s work has also been presented at in a program organized bythe Mori Art Museum (2007) and at Tokyo Opera City Gallery (2004) . The artist’s films have been presented at institutions internationally including screenings in Denmark, Spain, China, Norway, France, Australia and the United States. In 2000, Okumura was the recipient of the Phillip Morris Art Award and in 2006 a fellowship by the Asian Cultural Council.

Yuki Okumura’s work begins with an examination the body; particularly, that of the artist. The resulting observations take various forms ultimately amounitng to a flexible form of site-specific installation. Okumura’s understanding of “the body” is thoroughly contemporary, “I feel my body is not really a physical existence, but more something like digital data – it is not that my body “exists”, but some discrete values “appear” like so on the monitor called the world.”; consequently, a clear distinction between fact and fiction is blurred and Okumura often employs one media to provide a ground for another. This process; however, is ultimately bound to fail as neither physical object; i.e., sculpture nor filmed or photographic representation is any more or less solid – there is always room for slippage and it is from this inherent tension that Okumura’s work draws it’s initial tragic-comic power.

Ultimately optimistic, Okumura is, however, not content with simple observation and presentation; rather, he is presently engaged in an attempt to move beyond the contemporary – to a point at which concepts such as reality and fiction are no longer relevant and in which fundamental concepts are extended to a point beyond recognition. In the series of photogrpahs, drawings sculptures and film on view at MISAKO & ROSEN, based upon Okumura’s experiences in residency in Taipei, Dublin and Switzerland, base human material takes the form of elegant sculpture, the artist is documented existing in multiple places at the same time and the earth, itself, in a simple alchemical process, serves as a mirror of the artist and ,via extension, everyman.

I know that I am first of all an object. An aggregate of molecules that functions ruled by the laws of physics. A body. Inside the skin, there should be organs, flesh, bones, a bran and so on. But it somehow feels unrealistic to me. I feel my body is not really a physical existence, but more like something like digital data – it is not that my body “exists”, but some discrete values “appear” like so on the monitor called the world. Here I am purely an image that can be transfered or copy/pasted into any spacetime. This dualism of “what I know” and “what I feel”: “being an object” and “being an image” rips apart my body. Maybe.

Yuki Okumura