Michio Okabe
12 mins
Naked men play innocently in an Esoteric Buddhist temple, returning to their boyhood. Model aeroplanes, paper butterflies, vehicles, tiny toys, the objects they loved as boys emerge one after another from the darkness. Made in 1973, this rare moving image work visualises the dreams and attachments of a bygone boyhood with a unique sense of beauty and is regarded as one of the iconic works from Japanese avant-garde artist-filmmaker, Michio Okabe.
Michio Okabe (1937-2020) began his activities as an artist in the mid-1960s. Influenced by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), Okabe made his first film work Tenchi Sozosetsu (creation tale, 1965), which received a prize at the Sogetsu experimental film festival. The works that sublimate Susan Sontag’s thinking on camp into Okabe’s original camp aesthetic, have been highly received and have screened in Japan and abroad. Okabe passed away in September, 2020.