Long White Playground: How to Interact with Chance
By Yuki Okumura
In this research class, each of us enters an empty space empty-handed to make and install work on site, solely with found elements: materials, objects, situations, and/or individuals we encounter.
It is an exercise in releasing your working process from control and leaving it to chance. Every space has countless ideas in the air: courses of action yet to be carried out. Only those that resonate with your body and life reach you, as if the space assigns them to you so that it can update itself. You then perform each action as conceived, from which an unexpected form emerges.
To immerse yourself in such a process, you need to keep your head empty. While it is usually impossible for us overthinkers, the ‘conceptual-performative’ method makes it easy. Yuki Okumura developed this method from rule-based practices of the 1950s to the 1970s, namely experimental music, postmodern dance, and conceptual art. Through a simple workflow, it enables anybody to let go of intention and play with chance.
This time, our playground is the Lange Zaal. Try the method through reenactments, then adapt it in your own way to follow your curiosity. You work individually rather than collaboratively, sometimes taking part in each other’s procedure. With the direct outcome or trace of everybody’s game-like action left where it emerged, our exhibition naturally takes shape.
Here, it is not your sensitivity or skill but the space’s conditions and contexts that define the work, through your personality and biography as a unique translator. So take it easy, have fun, and let yourself and others be surprised by how things, and who you, happen to turn out.
→ The exhibition will open on 23 October, run until the end of the following week, and be part of Yuki Okumura’s PhD defence on Monday 26 October (tbc).
Yuki Okumura
Yuki Okumura is an artist and PhD researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and ARIA. He explores the intuitive conception and procedural performance of self-instructed, chance-oriented simple actions as a way of working to explore and update both self and world at once. Recent exhibitions in which he has employed this approach to ‘navigate’ individuals through the given space include Big White Playground, Secession, Vienna; Parasite the White Cube, Het Bos, Antwerp; and Medium and Dimension: Plastic, CS-Lab, Tokyo, all 2025.
Okumura’s PhD project at the Academy, Conceptual, Performative, Pedagogical, translates what he calls the ‘conceptual-performative’ method into a cross-disciplinary curriculum in order to incorporate the principle of the method and activate its full potential in today’s higher art education.
(Image: the Lange Zaal, photo by Yuki Okumura)
>> This research class is part of the Research Week during the annual research festival ARTICULATE.
