Another Story (2010) is a multimedia sculptural work created after Oh lived in Toronto from 2008-09 as a visiting scholar at York University and intern at the Textile Museum of Canada. At the time, she had been striving to find new ways to engage with the complexity of memory in her work, and found unexpected answers while reading Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1983) about a Japanese-Canadian woman retracing her family’s memories of incarceration and the transnational impacts of WWII. From 1942-49, Canada forcibly relocated and incarcerated 22,000 people of Japanese descent from the nation’s west coast for the sake of “national security,” regardless of their citizenship status. While fictional, Kogawa’s vivid first-person depictions of the challenges faced by different generations of Japanese-Canadian women before and after the war prompted Oh to recall the experiences of her grandmother and mother living as Koreans in Japan. She “sensed a universal narrative in the novel…a story of and for people who, in response to powerful forces, crossed borders.”

Taking care not to generalize the hardships faced, Oh considered the commonalities among immigrant communities, including unspoken memories, generational trauma, and discrimination. For Another Story, she invited 41 women, including her mother and sister, to read excerpts from a chapter of Obasan that takes the form of letters written by the main character’s aunt as she describes her experiences in Canada before and during WWII. The intermingling voices of women reading in English and Japanese produce a fragmented yet evocative narrative in the exhibition space—giving expression to an overlooked period of Canadian history while also engendering connections to other stories. This experiment in reading is accompanied by a soft sculpture created out of jute rope, which Oh tenderly unraveled to create the motif of an open book. Even as the jute sculpture appears to be light and fragile, its stillness evokes a compelling sense of heaviness.

Oh considers the unraveling of textile as a way to deconstruct texts, a process Another Story explores through visual and auditory representations of intergenerational storytelling. The process of reading Obasan, akin to the tactile experience of handling textile fibers, stirs memories for the artist. Yet the textural material and its flexible, yet three-dimensional form also resemble the structure of retrieving a memory. Memories attached to the women’s voices almost seem to be extracted from the pages of the book as the loose and fibrous structure of the pages are re-coiled into a long braid, resonant of braided hair. Oh calls further attention to the various ways in which she bundled and retwisted the unraveled material, using tightly-wrapped red silk yarn to create moments of brightness in the otherwise subdued color of the jute.

Audio text reference: Joy Kogawa. Obasan. Toronto, ON: Penguin, 1983 [1981].