Yuki Okumura

Born 1978. Enrolled at Tama Art University, Tokyo, and currently attending Queensland College of Art, Australia.

Yuki Okumura expands the realm of body art, constructing two recent series of works from fingernail clippings and from saliva. For Drop, he focused his digital video camera on the hands of different people cutting their fingernails. This act, very personal yet rendered anonymously, puts the viewer in the position of voyeur. Okumura then gathered the clippings, forming them into small, irregular spheres, and showed them lined up in the centers of common tin cans on a shelf, evoking a disturbing display of medical oddities or specimens. Clearly intending to provoke, Okumura exploits the uneasy tension between the animate and inanimate. For Carcass, the artist collects his own saliva, which he reduces to charred lacy abstract designs, recalling the unearthly transformations of a modern-day alchemist. These he mounts on small square acrylic slides, once again suggesting medical or scientific experiments.