Yuki Okumura
8.3. – 18.5.2025
Dear everyone who works as a cleaner, guard, or installer for the Secession:*
I hope that this message finds you well. My name is Yuki Okumura, and I will have a solo exhibition in the Hauptraum (which literally means ‘main space’) of the Secession, opening in the evening of 7 March 2025. This is a letter to invite you to take part in both a workshop that I will conduct and a group exhibition that I will organize within my solo exhibition.
I love an artwork when it shows how unique—not how special—the person who has made it is. In other words, to make a great work you don’t have to be genius, you just have to be a human person, because everybody is different from each other in the first place. For me, anybody, including myself, is like a lens that has its own distortion. It gives me great joy to learn, through the work, the unique nature of each lens: what curvature it has and in what way it reflects and refracts the world.
But one’s own uniqueness is difficult to grasp by oneself. You can only make it visible by letting your body act on its own, without encumbrance of reason: just relax, let your mind go blank, and react to the world spontaneously, so your personality manifests its true, unique state by itself. If you manage it, then the resulting work reveals not only a new face of who you are, but also a new aspect of what the world is.
But how, practically speaking, can we keep our mind blank and make such a work? I believe the most effective, fun, and instantaneous way to realize it is what I call the ‘conceptual/performative’ method, which anybody can use. It is a procedure in which you carry out a certain action by following a self-imposed set of simple rules, where the result is always unpredictable, determined just by the chance interaction between the self and the world. It was developed in the 1960s across diverse genres, in conceptual art, Fluxus, postmodern dance, etc.
This belief of mine is peculiar, but it has been proven true in the workshops I have conducted in Europe and Japan: regardless of age, background, and gender, the participants have made amazing works that show their uniqueness by adapting the method in their own ways. And everyone seemed to have fun—probably because, using this method, making a work equals playing a game that you invent.
Over the decades, the Hauptraum has served as a playground for artists. But rather than in those who are present temporarily for their exhibitions, I am interested in those who work in and for the space on a regular basis, like you. What details of the space have drawn your attention and how would you react to them in a conceptual/performative manner? Behind my interest is my wish to ‘meet’ you in person and also to have you discover new aspects of who you are, both through your work.
Above all, I am asking you for help. My exhibition explores this historical white cube currently called Hauptraum not as a neutral zone detached from the world but as an open part of the world that has its own life. For this purpose, I am working on two film-based projects called Wilhelm as Hauptraum and Secession’s Hive Mind(s), which deal with individual memories and collective anticipations, respectively, that fill this particular space. But various physical aspects of the space should also be worked on, and the problem is that it is massive and my own curvature is limited: a greater variety of reflections and refractions is needed.
With each of us just being ourselves fully, perspectives and standpoints will be much more pluralized and actions derived from the site will be much more diverse. Then, through us as unique lenses many previously unknown faces of the Hauptraum will certainly be revealed.
Let us all play—individually, but together, sharing the same space and time.
Yuki Okumura
*This text is the artist's actual letter to the cleaners, guards, and installers of Secession.
geboren 1978 in Aomori, Japan, lebt und arbeitet hauptsächlich in der mitteleuropäischen Zeitzone.