HIROYUKI OKI

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.