Kenjiro Okazaki: Time Unfolding Here

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is pleased to announce a major exhibition that delves into the creative core of Kenjiro Okazaki (b. 1955), one of the most prominent artists in Japan today.

Innovative not only in painting and sculpture, but also in a wide range of fields including architecture, environmental cultural sphere initiative, children’s books, and robotics, Okazaki has also been active as a culture critic. At the root is his conception and practice of zokei (plastic arts) as a force that reconnects our perception and the world.

With scientific and technological innovations such as Artificial Intelligence, environmental crises, and political chaos, the world and social institutions as we have known them seem to be rapidly losing their validity. Is the universe falling apart?

In response to this question, Okazaki asserts that it is not the world but our cognition that is disrupted. For him, zokei is the force that transforms the very framework for our perception of the world. In other words, it is about releasing the plasticity of the universe by changing our cognition of it, as well as restoring that same quality to perception through concrete engagement with the world. According to him, zokei is about reconnecting these two types of plasticity through practice.

The theme and significance of this exhibition is to present the major turn in Kenjiro Okazaki’s career as a plastic artist that occurred during this period, focusing on new works created after the large-scale solo exhibition held at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 2019, especially from 2022 onward.

Over the course of several years, Okazaki engaged in a process of reconnecting his body and consciousness through contact with the outside world, in an attempt to restore plasticity to them. For him this process was inseparable from zokei, i.e., practice of art creation. Okazaki had experienced a serious dissociation between the world and his mind and body, in which even his sense of time as a flow from the past to the future was lost at times, followed by a long and elaborate process of recovery. This latter partially coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the modern social order, predicated on the imperative that all its members exist in the same temporal-spatial framework, was called into question. His personal experience and the cataclysmic change in the world thus converged. In a mental state where the subjective and the objective were indistinguishable, Okazaki resumed his art making and went on to produce a series of works that far surpassed his previous output in both quality and quantity. 

The exhibition’s first section showcases masterpieces from Okazaki’s wide-ranging career, from painting and sculpture to architecture to other projects, while the second section presents the aforementioned turn through his output from 2022 onwards. Among these are the relief Kozukue and the original drawings for the now-legendary picture book Kaku (to write/draw/paint), a manifesto for art as a “pansophism,” a universal knowledge that addresses our cognition of the world. Never exhibited before, these early works reveal the beginning of Okazaki’s path as an artist. The galleries will also feature on wall labels with commentaries by the artist, who is also an accomplished critic and has written brilliantly about his own work.

The title of the current exhibition, "Time Unfolding Here”, is drawn from a passage in the Analects of Confucius. Tracing the oeuvre of Kenjiro Okazaki throughout a half-century, the show seeks to demonstrate an expanded mode of existence in time that transcends personal experience of an “I.” His works, imbued with a sense of rebirth, will open up a novel perspective originating in the artist’s persistent conviction that the world is in a perpetual state of rebirth and reinvention.

Curated by YABUMAE Tomoko, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

For more information: mot-art-museum.jp/en/exhibitions/kenjiro/

Image information
First image: Kenjiro Okazaki, Heads poking out, a shape with lion body and man's head. A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. Embankment crowded, a vast image troubles my sight. Everyone shouting, voices affectionate, half-crying. We're all gonna die. Darkness drops again. I heard ducks floating. 
Black rocks absorbed light. Was I all along born on the far shore? Cave pitch dark. Colors fade. Stretch out a hand. World already ended. 
Spread legs. Never to perish again. Only a presence—the subtle movement of air as someone searched. Solely ephemeral presence lingers. I remember who I am.
Earthquake shook. Sun black as sackcloth. Moon like blood. Stars fell to earth, fig tree dropping unripe fruit. Sky split apart, mountains and islands moved. Kings, slaves shouted, "Hide us from the throne, from the Lamb's wrath." Their day has come. I'm gonna faint! 

2024. 260.6 × 268.2 cm. Acrylic, canvas. Photo: Shu Nakagawa.

Second image: Kenjiro Okazaki, "What secrets lie within!" Moon pearls crowned garden walls. "Look how shadows dance!" Hark, Wind whispered phantom tales. "Stars sang memories deep. " "Time weaves silver dreams!" she shouted joyfully, "He lives!" And from the mountains the echo came back upon her, "he lives!"

"Is the spring coming?" Dawn mist cloaked emerald hills. "Do you have a garden?" Roses climbed ancient walls. "What makes the grass grow?" Rain whispered to the earth. "Where do old tales rest?" Time slept in shadows where moorland flowers bloom and fade.

2024. 208 × 117 cm. Acrylic, canvas. Photo: Shu Nakagawa.