Koichi Okazaki (b. 2000, Japan) is a visual artist using photography as a main medium.
Graduated from Royal College of Art with a MA degree in Photography in 2023.
Okazaki speculates and practices what it means to live humanly in contemporary society through his expression.
In this society, people, money, goods, information, and energy circulate in complex and enormous connections. This social system is driven by numbers and words that give specific meaning to what is within it and treat it as something measurable. However, this means the system is depriving the world of its true nature and treating everything as something that to be substituted. Living in such a system, one loses sight of "what" and "who" sustains one's life. I wonder how I could live in a more direct relationship with the world.
In this work, I attempted to recreate childhood memories of objects that seem to have embedded themselves deeply within my mind. In these moments the act of seeing was not completely systematized by words, and that enabled me to encounter the objects in their bare state. I tried to embody this sensation by photographically “staring” at specific points or qualities of objects that are left in my memory. However, what I realized is that at this point it is merely impossible to “see” without words. Since the world is too complex to comprehend without simplification and categorization by words. That is why this series is composed of multi-media, still-life photographs, photographs of images on a screen, and an image of text. Whether physical or representational, we perceive the world as equivalent and ultimately fix the meaning through words.
