Matthew Okazaki is an architect, artist, and educator based out of Boston, Massachusetts. His work investigates spaces of the in-between: territories of ambiguous authorship, cultural thresholds, and sites of convergent histories. Alongside his art practice, Okazaki runs the architecture and design firm Field Office LLC, and is a partner at Architecture for Public Benefit, an architecture office serving mission-driven organizations in the local Boston area. Okazaki holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design with commendation and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from UCLA. He currently teaches architecture and design studios at Northeastern and Tufts University and has held previous teaching positions at Brandeis University and Harvard University’s Design Discovery.

藝術家簡介

Matthew Akira Okazaki 是一位住在馬薩諸塞州的波士頓的建築師、藝術家和教育家。他的作品談論介於「兩者」之間的空間。包括不明確的身份、文化門檻、歷史焦距的地點。除了他的藝術實踐，Okazaki 經營一家建築和設計公司 Field Office LLC，並且是波士頓當地的建築事務所 Architecture for Public Benefit 的合作夥伴。Okazaki 擁有哈佛大學設計研究生院建築學碩士學位和加州大學洛杉磯分校應用數學理學學士學位。他目前在東北大學和塔夫茨大學教授建築和設計，並曾在布蘭代斯大學和哈佛大學的設計探索學院擔任過教學職務。

Matthew Okazaki
Ojichan's Home, Crystal City, Texas, 1945
祖父的家，德克薩斯州的水晶城，1945
Digital collage
11 x 14

“What are you? It is the question I have been asked my whole life. They ask because to them, I am something both foreign and familiar. I am close, but not quite. Not “actually” a minority, and yet, “so Asian.” Comfortable in no camp, the reclamation of my identity lies in the blur between. The border becomes territory; this is where I stake my practice.

Trained as an architect, I take materials, procedures, and subjects in architecture to create works that are simultaneously stable and precarious, deeply personal but distant. Through model-making, sculpture, and mixed-media, I arrange, layer, assemble, and erode in search of a balance that highlights both the individual parts along with the totalizing whole, often leaving the work in a seemingly state of incompletion. Drawing from my own identity as a mixed-race Japanese-American, I hope to reflect on and reconcile our individual and collective narratives, and to reveal the precarious nature of our desire to be independent, original, and authentic, while simultaneously aspiring to belong to something bigger – of a time, a place, a people, a culture, or a memory.

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My grandfather spent his youth in the internment camps during World War II. They stayed in horse stables and campground barracks. He says that there was so much dust. In the middle of the war, in the middle of the desert, surrounded by barbed wire fences and outposts and armed guards, it was a place-between, where the conflict of identity was made manifest. A placeless place for those inexplicably extracted from their former lives, from their former selves. And yet, despite the incredible hardships, looking back my grandfather told me he sometimes took comfort there in the desert. I wonder if for him, there was a respite in the blur, my grandfather unable to find firmer ground elsewhere after the war. He struggled his whole life constantly being torn between two worlds: an American citizen, never American enough.

I dedicate my work to him.” — Matthew Okazaki

自述

「What are you?」 是我一生中被問過無數次的問題。他們問是因為對他們來說，我既陌生又熟悉。實際上不能算少數民族，但又不夠像亞洲人。在無營中安逸，我的身份就在這迷離之間，徘徊在者中邊界變成領土的地方。作為一名建築師，我利用建築中的材料、程序和主題來創作以及探索有時感覺穩定但有時感覺遙遠的自身。通過模型製作、雕塑和混合媒體，我改編、分層、組裝和侵蝕，以尋求一種平衡，往往使作品處於一種看似不完整的狀態。從我自己作為混血日裔美國人的身份出發，我希望反思并调和我们个人和集体的敘事方法。揭示我们渴望独立、原创和真实的不稳定本质，以及分析人类想要属于更大共同体——一个时间、一个地方、一个民族， 一种文化，一种记忆的渴望。

二戰期間，我的祖父在拘留營度過了他的青年時代。他們住在馬廄和營房裏。他說那裏灰塵很多。在戰爭與沙漠的中央，被鐵絲網、哨所和武裝警衛包圍著，讓身份的沖突介於混亂之間顯現的淋漓盡致。一個不算「地方」的地方，為了失去自己以前的生活、以前的自我的人們存在著。然而，盡管經歷了難以置信的艱辛，我的祖父曾告訴我，他有時在沙漠中會感到慰藉。我的祖父在戰後無法在其他地方找到更堅實的基礎。我想對他來說，只在迷茫之中給了他喘息的機會。他一生都在掙紮在兩個世界之間：一個永遠不夠「美國人」的公民。

我把我的作品獻給他