OKADA Hiroko "Dusky Room"（TOKYO）

Mizuma Art Gallery is pleased to annouce OKADA Hiroko exhibition “Dusky Room” from 21 October 2009.

Okada’s works are based on her real life captured in her own perspective and have been highly received in and out of Japan. In recent years, as well as participating in some exhibitions in France and etc., she seeks the relationship between art and local community through working with a group of student at Chiba University. She sincerely faces to the characteristic of society and problems take root from all angles. 

In new video installation “Dusky Room”, Okada plays old woman who lives in run down house with full of garbage. The weak to be protected and persons want to help out of obligation and good intension weave the story. 

She turns the gallery space into a theatre and a house of garbage is a “stage”. The audience him/herself is expected to be on the empty stage to experience the situation from the woman’s point of view. He/She realizes that it could happen to every one of us and this is the time we live in. 

In Japan which faces an aging society with a falling birthrate, “unclear family” and “poor interpersonal relation to neighbors in urban society” surely undermine our life, and the term “care”, “solitary death”, “single old age” and “house of garbage” symbolize the social problem we suffer. We might share the “Dusky Room”, which refer to current issues and capture the characteristics of the time and social situation, as common scenery in our heart.

—What is the border between what we need and the trash? Who is the indispensable and who is dreg of the society? As I am not tidy person at all, I recently imagine masochistically my old age, and how dirty I could be.

However there are stories in any life. I wish to find a ray of beauty in mistakes, not only in correctness, and in glory and fading…Thinking about it, I don’ t think I can be a neat after all.

OKADA Hiroko—