Hiroyuki Oki Biography

Hiroyuki Oki’s work spans across a plethora of activities from performance and installation to painting. However, he is most widely known as an “experimental documentarist.” He uses his films as a medium to explore relentlessly the human consciousness, and to capture, affirm, and renew the world in which we live. His films are often experimental, and he acknowledges time and space - which encompass the human experience including politics and sexuality- as universal themes in his oeuvre. His concerns with contemporary issues including economic developments and the state of capitalism also tie into all of his work. Oki detects an impasse or a bias in people’s sense of “time,” and his work attempts to address this blockage, to reinvigorate his audience’s sensitivity, and stimulate their thought processes.

From an early age, Oki was interested in architecture. He was intrigued by physical structures, but also by people and their relationships to buildings scattered across towns and cities, making up specific landscapes and cityscapes. With such a personal and holistic approach towards architecture, he entered university with a predilection for postmodernism. Once in school, however, he found that the teachings were more orthodox, and he began making films with his classmates. While he shifted from architecture to filmmaking, he does not consider the two as completely disparate creative fields. The artist finds similarities between the two, describing both as comprehensive methods. As an architect, Oki aims to capture the whole, including people, objects, and time, which he does in his films through light, space, and movement.

One of Oki’s representative works is the 8mm film A Film of Buddy Matsumae (1988-89), which he submitted as his graduation project to the University of Tokyo. To Oki, this project is not a film, but architecture. He describes the film as a structure he drew up, seen through the eyes of the fictional junior high school character in the film, Buddy Matsumae. He has been filming the Buddy Matsumae series every year for over 20 years, and he continues to film it every year in the town of Matsumae, Hokkaido in northern Japan. Oki senses something like a spirit or an aesthetic in Matsumae’s history, location, nature and people that impels him to continue shooting there.

The prolific artist has been receiving high acclaim since the 1990s, winning the Special Juror’s Prize for his 8mm film Swimming Prohibited (1989) at the 1990 Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, and the NETPAC Prize at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival in 1996 for his 16mm work HEAVEN-6-BOX (1994–95). He went on to screen at international film festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City (1999) and the Rotterdam International Film Festival (1999).

Oki has held numerous solo exhibitions including Gendaishi, Shionoe Museum of Art, Kagawa, Japan (2014). His work has appeared in group exhibitions including Yebisu International Festival for Art&Alternative Vision, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (2012) ; The Age of Micropop, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (2007); STILL LIFE ART - ECOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGE, Sharjah Biennial, Qanat Al Qasba,Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2007) ; Out of the Ordinary: New Video from Japan, MOCA Grand Avenue, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (2007); Roppongi Crossing, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2004); and How Latitudes Become Forms: Art In a Global Age, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2003). His films have also been screened at Art Basel (2002), Art Basel Hong Kong (2014); Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Yamagata, Japan (1997, 2009, 2011, 2013); and Musée du Cinéma, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1993, 1995).

Public collections:

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Takamatsu City Museum, Japan
Aichi Arts Center, Aichi, Japan
Kochi Prefectural Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan

Text by Makiko Arima