Shuhei Okawara
Butoh dancer and dealer.
He buys and sells people’s faces, gets other people’s names tattooed on his own skin, and sells playing cards disguised as cigarettes.
“That Face” is part of the collection at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Austria.
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Main Works
Ownership
Shuhei Okawara does not engage in practical craftsmanship. Instead, he develops projects that challenge existing frameworks by making full use of technologies such as buying, selling, ownership, and distribution.
His project “That Face,” which involves buying and selling human faces, is not only owned by numerous celebrities, including The Weeknd, but has also garnered international acclaim beyond the realm of fine art, having been acquired by the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Austria.
His recent project, “Skin Share,” involves sharing the surface of his own skin with others. By tattooing the purchaser’s real name onto his body, he highlights the casual nature of the act of signing—which holds social validity—and the uncertainty of ownership. The work was exhibited at Art Fair Beppu 2025, where he was invited to participate.
Rather than working as a craftsman, he engages in his practice by intentionally misreading relationships between people and the concept of ownership.
Slowness
After teaching himself animation dance, he began studying under the butoh dancer Shoichi Fukushi at the age of 17. He has been active for many years as a dancer in “Butoh,” a performing art originating in Japan.
In recent years, he has stepped away from producing stage works and has continued to explore ways of aesthetically reinterpreting human movement in everyday life.
He continues to develop projects that use the body and time in everyday life as their raw material, such as “Residence Time,” a project that evaluates the very possibility of one’s presence, and “Super happy sugar bunny,” who works with “vitality”—a force that blows away all other concepts.
Game
As an attempt to rethink the reality of work, he continue to engage in research-based practices centered on concepts such as “leisure” and “boredom,” including taking walks during business hours and restructuring the forms of compensation.
While people have no choice but to live with leisure, they are burdened with the inescapable fate of being unable to escape the dulling of their senses by constantly seeking to alleviate boredom. In recent years, he has been dedicated to developing the concept of “games” as a means of countering all forms of alienation.
He finds hope in the phenomena that emerge when existing daily practices are lived as play, such as the “Money Exchange,” where participants believe currency exchange is a game, and the “Trading Business Card Game,” where people exchange business cards with one another.
He also organizes seminars and study groups, using theoretical frameworks to help support these practical endeavors.
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