Inspired by the peculiar subjectivity of a translator and driven by his belief in our essential interconnectedness, Yuki Okumura (born 1978, Aomori) questions the notion of individuality based on bodily demarcation. Okumura’s work primarily takes the form of performative actions through which he re-defines identity in accordance with overlaps and gaps across different persons, often including himself, and re-embodies this new individual with his own living body here and now as a medium or catalyst, with art history as a test site for human society at large.
Okumura’s PhD project rediscovers the process of making a work of conceptual art in the 60s and 70s as an extraordinary program that simultaneously exposes who the artist truly is as a corporeal self and expands the boundary of their personhood beyond physicality.