meta dramatic is a work that OKI Hiroyuki presented as a finalist in the “First Commission Project” at the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023. From a “meta” vantage point—looking in from outside and above the frame of what we call “drama”—the work overlays this gaze with moments cast as “dramatic events,” tracing a contemporary condition in which the boundaries between reality and fiction, the moving image and live performance, society and the individual, blur and interlace.

On screen, moving images play; at the same time, a live performance unfolds in the space. Each inflects the other, drawing viewers into the work as a single, continuous experience. The moving-image work—four seven-minute units (28 minutes total)—was built up in multiple superimposed strata from footage shot at PEPPERLAND, a live music venue in Okayama; repeatedly updated over the course of the exhibition in tandem with performances staged throughout the run, it reached its finished form through that process.

This exhibition presents the finished, previously unseen version now held in the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum collection, inviting viewers—through the quiet force of OKI’s absence since his passing last year—to look again at the significance of his work and practice.