90 x 300 cm
UN / WEAVING: Haji Oh
Haji Oh (b. Osaka, 1976) is a third generation Zainichi Korean artist, born and raised in Japan and now based in Australia. She draws on her family’s migration from Jeju Island to Japan in the 1930s to trace transpacific memory through dynamic experiments with textile, photography, and cyanotype. She studied Dyeing and Weaving at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, receiving her MA in 2002 and PhD in 2012. Oh is a recipient of the 2024-26 Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (TCAA).
Un / Weaving showcases a selection of artworks representative of Oh’s oeuvre as she gives expression to the liminality of communities that are often obscured by national histories. Through the labor intensive processes of weaving, unraveling, and printing, the artist uses textile to explore the three-dimensional space of memory, revealing hidden layers and blank spaces that mirror the variability of reconstructed narratives.
Oh’s early works, Three Generations (2004) and Three Generations of Time (2004) express the “unknowability” of her grandmother’s migration story after she passed away in 2001. Combining portraiture and traditional dress, these works address Oh’s identity as a Korean in Japan and questions about her grandmother’s past. In the late 2000s, Oh began to incorporate extensive archival research about transpacific migration into her work. Her experiences in Toronto as a visiting scholar at York University and intern at the Textile Museum of Canada led to Another Story (2010), expanding her introspective practice to remember the experiences of incarcerated Japanese-Canadian women during WWII. Oh moved to Australia in 2014, where she started her Grand-mother Island Project series (2017–Present), tracing untold stories of migrant labor communities that have crossed the Pacific Ocean. Un / Weaving features three chapters of Oh’s ongoing project, including the first of the artist’s site-specific Seabird Habitatscapes series (2024–Present). Juxtaposed with a projection of an archival British map of the Pacific from 1798, Oh combines cyanotype and hogushigasuri (warp printing ikat) to recontextualize the idyllic landscapes of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, contending with the logic of empire entangled in cartography, phosphate mining, and labor migration in the Pacific from a bird’s-eye view.
Each installation of Oh’s work in a new space is a form of ritual. As she shifts seamlessly between the personal and global, the memory of Oh’s grandmother is carried into the present as both a grounding figure and metaphor for inherited pasts. Un / Weaving highlights the artist’s distinct approach to textile and memory, creating an intimate space for viewers to reimagine the past while reflecting on the limits of national boundaries.
Curated by Eimi Tagore-Erwin
