I recently had the pleasure of viewing some of his works in the exhibition Twist and Shout at the BACC in Bangkok. His video Rompers (still from the installation above) was enchanting and I kept coming back for repeated viewings. The childish melody sung by the girl sitting in a tree, looped over and over, and even weeks later it’s exact effect os still with me. Especially when my daughter sings something similar. Like much of his work I have seen, Rompers was approachable, had a sense of fantasy or play, and yet contains bits of disturbing imagery and themes.
In his video Rompers, Odani takes the viewer into an animated world in which all creatures seem to be living together in harmony. A little girl is sitting with childlike innocence on a branch in a tree top, singing happily in the company of the animals of the forest: toads, squirrels, birds, and even worms, bees and other insects. This happy, sweet setting recalls the children’s programme Romper Room, which showed children and puppets displaying good values to its audience through music and songs. However, all that would have been normal in the program is here transformed: the mushrooms grow disproportionately in the grass, the tree has a honeycomb full of orange honey inside it, the toads with their extra-long limbs have ear-shaped wings, and the girl, who has no eyebrows and possesses longer-than-normal fingers, suddenly sticks out a reptile tongue to gobble up an insect. All the living creatures seem to be in the middle of a process of genetic mutation. The girl is even wearing a flowery dress and fruit-decorated hairgrips in her hair – an allusion, perhaps, to man’s attempts to dominate nature. The artist shows his own personal and humorous view of scientific breakthroughs and their effects on the environment: a futuristic vision of a present-day reality.