Haji Oh

rdf:langString Haji Oh

rdf:langString Haji Oh (呉夏枝 (お・はぢ), Oh Haji, b. 1976, Osaka) is a third-generation Zainichi Korean contemporary artist. Her Japanese name is Okamura Natsue. Trained primarily as a textile artist, Oh employs a wide variety of weaving, dyeing, stitching, and braiding techniques in her artwork, as well as incorporating photography, audio, and text components. Drawing from her personal transnational experience as an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, Oh uses her art to aid in the expression of Zainichi identities within the social and historical context of a larger, interconnected community. Her conceptual artworks and art installations explore the hybridity of Japanese and Korean cultural and political identities, attempting to shed light on the repressed memories and untold histories of diasporic Korean women. She often problematizes the notions of homogeneity that are used to determine fixed ethnic identities, instead emphasizing heterogeneity, hybridity, and fluidity through the acts of dyeing, layering, stitching, and amalgamating fabrics and textiles from Korea and Japan. She has engaged with Korean and Japanese clothing in many of her works, and often incorporates her late grandmother's clothing into her art practice as a way to explore the "unknowable" memories and silent experiences of her own ancestors' migration from the Jeju Islands as well as the transnational journeys of others with "double" identities in Japan. Oh has participated in a variety of group and solo exhibitions within Japan and abroad, such as "Inner Voices" at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2011); VoCA - Vision of Contemporary Art at New York University (2012); "Gestures in Clothing" at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (2013); and the Busan Biennale, Korea (2014). From 2008-2009, she was a visiting scholar at the York Centre for Asian Research at York University in Toronto, Canada. She has been based in Australia since 2014.