24 Hours with Ken Okiishi

For people who may not be familiar with your practice, I’d love to include a brief introduction. How would you describe your work and the mediums you engage with?

Ken Okiishi: That’s always the hardest question for an artist. I work in film. My mother used to say that my approach to art is like writing music, and I think she had a point. When you grow up with music and learn it as a practice, it shapes the way your brain works. That ability to move fluidly between different modes of expression, whether it be painting, filmmaking, or performance, it feels natural to me.

At its core, my work is about capturing a full expression of complex thoughts and feelings, whether through painting or film. I’m also deeply interested in the shifting relationship between screen space and physical existence. We often think of them as separate, but in reality, they continuously shape and alter each other. By engaging with that division, I explore how our bodies and minds adapt to an increasingly screen-mediated world.

Expanding on that, did you plan specific shots, or was it a more spontaneous process? Were there moments you wanted to capture but couldn’t, for example, due to lighting conditions or other limitations?

Yeah, that definitely happened, especially when I was starting the painting. But I actually think the darkness worked really well in that case.

It mirrored the way thoughts form while working—how they emerge, fade, overlap, or suddenly become clear. Sometimes you’re thinking of two, four, or 10 things at once. The way the light shifted, going in and out of focus, ended up mimicking that mental process pretty accurately. I was happy that the camera could capture that visually.

If I had tried to achieve the same effect with an iPhone, it would have required an intense amount of editing. But the specific features of this Super 8 camera, its frame rate and the way it registers light, allowed it to happen in real time. So in a way, the camera facilitated this seamless blending of thought, process, and image.

At a certain point, I had to go into Midtown, which introduced all these layers, colors, people, bodies, lights. It was still January, so some holiday lights were up, and I was experimenting a lot with frame rates, panning across the street, seeing what would happen. I was really happy with how that section turned out because it captured what it actually feels like to walk through those blocks, how everything jumps into your vision at once.

The way Super 8 renders light gives everything a slightly ’70s texture, but then in the earlier section, you see me working on paintings with digital screens as the support surface. So visually, you’re moving between different temporal spaces. I think that reflects how we experience time now, fractured across multiple realms. Everything today is intentionally fractured, fragmented, pulling us in different directions, and this medium somehow feels right for capturing that.

I also find those particular blocks in Midtown fascinating. It’s a mix of workers, tourists, and people from all over the world. Every time you walk down that street, you get this window into the entire globe. You see it in people’s faces, the stress, the disorientation, the zoning out. It’s like every microsecond carries an overload of global information.

At the end of that walk, I was heading to B&H because, of course, you always have to go to B&H for something. On the way, if you turn around, you get this incredible view of the Empire State Building, this classic Warhol-like view. You can’t escape it; in New York, you’re always somehow caught in a Warholian universe.

That day was overcast, and just before the building’s lights came on, I was framing the shot. What I didn’t capture was the moment it actually lit up. But in a way, I like that, the anticipation of it. You feel like it’s about to happen, and then, oops, the film runs out.

Before this project, you hadn’t worked with Super 8. Now that you have, do you have any new thoughts on what it provides? You’ve already touched on a lot, but do you feel it expands your work in any unexpected ways?

What’s interesting is that I actually had a kind of block against using film for a long time. When I was studying, there was a real divide between video art and film. Video was all about directness, a kind of raw, punk, sometimes ugly reality effect. Film, on the other hand, was often seen as nostalgic, tied to a more traditional avant-garde that was very male-dominated.

I studied with artists from both camps, Robert Breer, but also Rita Myers, Laura Cottingham, Leslie Singer, Cecilia Dougherty. They had very different perspectives, and I chose video because it allowed me to do what I wanted to do. So in a way, this project was a funny full-circle moment, my first time actually making a film on film.

It was exciting because it pushed me to tap into things I had learned about, films I had studied, technical concepts I had absorbed but never applied firsthand. We used to watch everything on film at Anthology Film Archives—Peter Kubelka, all these experimental works—so I had all of this context, but I’d never engaged with it practically.

So when we got the reels back, I had this moment of surprise, like, “Wow, I did it! I can actually work with film!” It was a kind of personal revelation, revisiting something I had once rejected and discovering that, in the right context, it could feel totally new.

The last thing I want to ask about is the music element in your piece, because I think yours is different. You were literally rehearsing your own music. Can you talk about how that came into the process? When did you think of incorporating it, and how did you see it working within the piece?

It’s a bit complicated, but the short version is that I studied music seriously before going to art school. I probably intended to go to a conservatory at some point, but I had to make a decision between music and art. Even though I don’t perform much, I still play the piano regularly, and it remains part of my creative process.

Since Super 8 is silent, I started thinking about what aspect of my practice felt similar to preparing to paint. And in a strange way, practicing music feels very much like that. When you’re about to paint, you have to sensitize your whole body, make sure you’re fully present, so that when you make a mark, it’s intentional. It’s a kind of performance. It becomes alive, transmitting thought and energy.

Practicing music functions similarly. It’s not just about emotion, even though music often feels deeply emotional. It’s also physical, it makes you want to move, dance, hum, or sing along. It activates something in you. That’s the same kind of activation I hope painting can achieve.

I’ve been learning [Johann Sebastian Bach’s] Goldberg Variations for fun and when I started experimenting with music for this project, I realized the timing worked perfectly for one of the variations. I layered them over the footage and saw that it just clicked. It made sense in a way I hadn’t expected.