Okazaki Mio, "CAPTURED [VINYL EDITION] #02": A 360-Degree Perspective Sealed in a Single Painting
Mio Okazaki — Artist page
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Okazaki Mio, “CAPTURED [VINYL EDITION] #02” — A 360-Degree Perspective Sealed in a Single Painting
Photography is convenient, yet also merciless. It records only a single angle from a single point where the photographer happened to stand.
Okazaki Mio’s turn to Cubism is rooted in resistance to that limitation. A professional wrestling ring is surrounded on all sides by spectators. From ringside, one looks up at the ridge of a fighter’s spine; from a seat on the diagonal, one reads the arc of a technique in motion; from the upper tier, the body resolves into pure geometry. In the same instant, entirely different scenes unfold across 360 degrees. Okazaki disassembles those views, reconstructs them, and allows them to coexist within a single pictorial field.
CAPTURED [VINYL EDITION] #02 (300 × 450 mm, acrylic on canvas) belongs to the “VINYL EDITION” series, in which that methodology is further layered with the visual language of the record sleeve. A vinyl record plays music as a needle traces its grooves. This painting, too, follows a different path each time the needle of the viewer’s gaze is set down, bringing a different facet to the surface. It is not a work to be seen once and set aside. With each successive viewing, the shift in the viewer’s own perspective becomes, in itself, a shift in the work.
Okazaki graduated from the Department of Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University, receiving the Outstanding Graduation Work Award, and subsequently spent approximately two years as an editorial journalist for the professional wrestling weekly Weekly Pro Wrestling, stationed at ringside. The structural thinking of design and the physical memory of absorbing the heat of the ring at close range — it is at the intersection of those two formations that Okazaki Mio’s practice is situated.
This work changes its response depending on the angle from which it is approached — which is to say, it places the viewer’s own perspective in question.
Enquiries are welcome through Gallery Seek.
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