P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

MoMA

Join the email list

P.S.1 Newspaper

2007 Fall

Masato Okada: An Angel's Vanishing Point

Kazue Kobata

Every time I arrived at the perfor­mance site, Masato Okada would qui­etly appear out of nowhere and come closer, holding his Hasselblad in his left hand and rubbing the camera body. He’d say, “Maido (thanks again)!” His dark pupils would give a sharp glance at me, and a moment later, they were turned somewhere else. “It’s #$&@ today, isn’t it?” or something, he’d say with a heavy Western-Japan accent.

Whenever I learned that Masato Okada would photograph Min’s dance, the first thing that came to my mind—before the actual shooting—was his vantage point. To be honest, it was a somewhat odd idea that he would take a portrait of a dancer or a person. The life-size two-dimensional composition of a portrait—to be done by Okada—felt odd to me. This feeling was not something I got through conversations with him; it was something I deciphered through observ­ing him. His eyes were restlessly moving about; he was in and out of sight, unnoticed, as though he was restraining himself not to stay put at one point.

One day in 1977 he asked, “You want to go?” and took Min Tanaka and myself, the sole spectator, to Yume-no-shima (Dream Island) on the edge of the Bay of Tokyo. It was still then used as a waste dump site. Heaves of dumped and rotting materials just lay there, floating above dark water and discharging smelly methane gas. He drove his Hi-Ace van and broke through the iron-net gate for dumper trucks. We found ourselves in another world…at high noon. Endless traces of “present moments” and “actions” were breathing. Hundreds of bankbooks, hundreds of fabric swatch bundles, and poisonous industrial waste in the processes of decomposition and muta­tion…the gate was an entrance only opened to him. I suspected he had secret moments of correspondence…alone.

Excerpted from the essay by P.S.1 Inter­national Adjunct Curator Kazue Kobata from the catalogue Between Mountain and Sea: Photography of Masato Okada, edited by Sumie Tanabe.