Binding Threads/Expanding Threads – The Art of Creating “Between-ness”: Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan

Haji Oh

22 Dec 2017 - 4 Mar 2018

“Binding threads/Expanding threads – The art of creating “Between-ness”

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art

Hiroshima, Japan

Grand-Mother Island project: Chapter 2, Floating Forest

Floating Forest consists of seven pieces of textiles. It is an imaginary forest that is floating somewhere. The forest represents a dwelling of memory of lives, time and space. The trees serve as shelter to protect them and as a place for recalling them.

“I imagined the forest, which consists of shadows of trees, floating or hanging from the surface of the water. The shadow represents an existence and deforms shape depending on the angle of the light. Then, it could be a metaphor for the presence of the visible world and the invisible another world.” – Haji Oh

Warps are rolled around two tods; one is attached to a strap worn around the weaver’s waist, and the other is tied with ropes or strings to pillars or tables and so stabilized. Weavers adjust the tension of the warps by using their bodies as they weave.

The Grand-Mother Island project traces the trajectories of people who have crossed the Pacific Ocean, such as between Australia, Japan, and Korea, focusing on how individual narratives are interwoven with history to create new communities.
Grand-Mother Island constitutes an imaginary space that inherits and generates untold stories beyond the nation. According to Benedict Anderson, the nation is an imagined political community, where imagining a shared history strengthens a sense of national belonging. This project imagines space between nations, spaces of movement that expand our horizons. Using the metaphor and universal experience of the grandmother, it brings to life stories of connected pasts that open us to others.