Hiroyuki Oki
Hiroyuki Oki was born in Tokyo in 1964, and his activities are based in Kochi Prefecture, Tokyo, and other locations.
He began producing video works in the early 1980s, while he was pursuing studies in the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Engineering. In 1989, he launched the Matsumae-kun series consisting of video works made mainly in Matsumae-cho, Hokkaido. He received the Special Jury Prize at the Image Forum Festival for his film Swimming Prohibited in 1990, and the NETPAC Award at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival for his HEAVEN-6-BOX (1995) in 1996. His artistic activities are by no means confined to video; they also extend to drawing, installation, and performance.
Oki stays in motion and has traveled to various places around the world, including not only Hokkaido and the Tohoku region in Japan but also Arizona, China, Israel, and Congo, with camera in hand. From the correlative nexus of travel, lifestyle, and philosophy, he depicts a world endowed with a complex composition by dynamic networking. He has been given the highest accolades both inside and outside Japan for the unique poetic expression of his videos featuring a huge quantity of images that follow each other in rapid succession, and has also taken part in numerous international exhibitions.
Oki has taken part in many exhibitions, the main ones including “ART/DOMESTIC Temperature of the Time”, Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo, 1999); “How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age”, Walker Art Center / Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Minneapolis / Turin, 2003); “Roppongi Crossing: New Visions in Contemporary Japanese Art 2004”, Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2004); “The Sharjah Biennial 8”, Qanat Al Qasba (Sharjah, 2007); “Out of the Ordinary”, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 2007); “The Door into Summer: The Age of Micropop”, Art Tower Mito (Ibaraki 2007); “Hiroshima Trilogy: 70th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombing Part 1 – Life=Work”, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, 2015); “Aichi Triennale 2016 : Rainbow Caravan – Homo Faber”, Hotta Shoji Co. Building (Aichi 2016); “Doing History!”, Fukuoka Art Museum (Fukuoka, 2016); “M+ Moving Image Collection”, M+ (Hong Kong, 2021); “Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023: Technology?”, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (Tokyo, 2023) and “Anarchism as alternative art and other ways of life: Potential not to be and not to do”, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (Aichi, 2024-2025).
Additionally, two films will be included in two National Film Archive in 2022.
In 2023, I Like You, I Like You Very Much (1994) was invited to be screened at Barbican Center in London, and Color Eyes (1992) from the museum collection was screened on large-scale outdoor screen at M+ in Hong Kong.
Public Collection
Aichi Arts Center, Aichi, Japan
Daisuke Miyatsu Collection
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan
Kochi Prefectural Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan
M+, Hong Kong
National Film Archive of Japan, Tokyo
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo
Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Kagawa, Japan
Takahashi Ryutaro Collection
Exhibition