Mana Okamoto

Monday, February 14, 2011

Yellow

What is yellow? "Yellow" is not actually yellow, and doesn't have to be. My definition of yellow and yours are probably different.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Tree, Wood, Forest

In Japanese, tree is "木", wood is "林", forest is "森".
As you see, all words contain the same form "木", but show scales by number of form.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Modern Meditation (2005)
Mixed media
(Rice, shower curtains, woods, plasters etc.)
I used laundry image (washing machine) and projected on the wall.
8x8x8ft

Getting outside of Japan has been a great opportunity to see Japanese culture from a different perspective. Everything in Japan had become ordinary to me while I was living there, so I had never paid attention to my culture before. Finally, I realize how intellectual and profound traditional Japanese culture is.
I became particularly attracted to the idea of the Japanese garden as a space for meditation and refuge. Researching the gardens I found an entire world of meaning and precise calculation that couldn’t be expressed to an outsider through language and words. Rather, they were articulated through stone, plant, water, moss, etc. This kind of physical language is what I am trying to create in my work. In this project, my art attempts to explore and explain my culture in a way that would be impossible with language or words.
Because I sometimes miss Japan, I decided to create this space to meditate on my home country outside of Japan. Now I’m in New York, and New York is one of the biggest and most modern cities in the world. We have access to diverse culture and merchandise. So, I would like to compare isolated Japanese culture and diversity of New York. The space consists of artificial representations in Japanese garden, stones (plasters), sands (rice) and outlining a physical space for meditation and translating a major theme-word of my new perspective about Japanese culture – nostalgia, isolation, obedient and rule oriented, subdued and politeness.