Rompers

Motohiko Odani has been celebrated for his meticulously crafted objects and visions of utopia and dystopia since the late 1990s. A main theme underlying his sculpture, photography, and video work is mutation of humans and animals. In his celluloid-colored video Rompers, a computer-graphic-enhanced mutant girl sings, idyllically, while eerie insects crawl around her. She is indifferent to them and seems to accept that she is becoming something other than herself. The work comments on the mutation of nature in an age of bioengineering while appropriating the innocent setting of the children’s TV program, Romper Room that originally aired in the United States in the 1950s. On the Japanese version that was shown during the late 1960s and the 1970s, toy bees and cute animals frolicked with children.