Authorised Silence: Okabe’s File
Koichiro Osaka
Authorised Silence: Okabe’s File is a lecture-performance centred on the political uses of silence and anchored in the biography of cultural administrator Nagakage Okabe (1898–1970). Key exhibitions—such as Abstract Art Exhibition: Japan and USA (Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1955)—are read through spatial design, using dry garden paradigms and sacred-rope demarcations as lenses to illuminate the museum’s institutional rationalities. The exhibitions are approached as ritualised sites of neo-traditionalist, ethno-symbolic display, mapping how calligraphic and ink-based aesthetics circulated and were instrumentalised under Cold War tension. Drawing on archival sources and visual records of period painting, the piece foregrounds vernacular affinities within regional modernism, and sketches an archival dramaturgy in which procedure choreographs recall, yet deliberately preserves intervals of silence.
Koichiro Osaka (Singapore/Tokyo) is a curator, writer, and art history researcher, currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Osaka studied and worked in Bangkok and London before moving to Tokyo, where he founded the independent exhibition space ASAKUSA in 2015. Over the past decade, he has curated site-oriented and politically reflexive projects, often with the support of municipal and public organisations. In 2023, he established the 0-eA Society for the Curatorial, a non-profit research initiative dedicated to fostering curatorial experimentation. His exhibitions include Imperial Ghosts in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the ICA) (e-flux, New York, 2019) and Curse Mantra: Jusatsu Kito Sodan (Para Site Residency, Hong Kong, 2019). Most recently, he organised the curatorial symposium YANARI in collaboration with the Seoul Museum of Art (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2025).
Osaka holds a BA in Art Criticism and Curation and an MA in Socially-Engaged Performance from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.