PRESS RELEASE

YUKI OKUMURA is a Japanese artist based in Brussels and Maastricht who is best known for translating artwork into another by cutting holes in it, slicing through time, foundations and facades. In redefining the structure and space of the work, he emphasizes an agressive concern with socio-aesthetic issues. Okumura says, “By shuffling identities and names there are many aspects of the physical condition against which I am gesturing,” of which economic repression ( he often works with abandoned, forgotten structures) and the property motive ( he takes over an artwork with and without permission from the originator) are but two. Working on the art and with a full vocabulary of personal concerns, Okumura has done a number of direct actions such as presenting translators to people in the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo or staging children’s exercises in such unlikely locations as within the space Wiels and the Zentrum Paul Klee. He is most notorious for combining elements of an-identity and guerilla tactics as in his spring long take-over of the Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo in 2015. During that time he made a number of attempts before the exhibition committee caught up with him disrupting both Okumura and his collaborators with a multitude of complaints. His work for his last MISAKO & ROSEN exhibition in 2015 was a highly publicized urban oddity. He cut an enormous discursive tunnel through a work by Slovakian artist Roman Ondák.

Through the auspices of Flor Bex, the former I.C.C. and MuHKA director, and with little-to-no municipal objection, Okumura has nearly finished a major film work in Brussels entitled Welcome Back, Gordon Matta-Clark. The project is nearing completion this summer in conjunction with an exhibition at MISAKO & ROSEN just in front of the streetcar in Minami-Otsuka. It consists of an elaborate series of holes and slices worked out in an almost musical score where a fixed set of elements played their way up and down throughout the layers. A terrific sense of disorientation in walking through multiple times is created by an unnerving elimination of death and from perspectives not normally visable in a living structure.

Until now, the work has been closed to the public. It will now be shown to small groups at statements, Tokyo, on July 1st.

There will also be the Okumura exhibition of picto-documentary, project description works and sculptural photography. The exhibition will have its opening on June 4th at MISAKO & ROSEN.