Haji Oh

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. 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 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.

Early life and "double" identity Haji Oh is a third-generation Zainichi Korean artist, born and raised in Osaka, Japan. Like many Zainichi Koreans of her generation, Oh grew up with two names—her Korean name is Oh Haji and her Japanese name is Okamura Natsue. After years of only using her Japanese name in public, Oh began to also use her Korean name when she started exhibiting artworks during her undergraduate studies, grounding her stance as an artist with a "double" identity.

"I have two names, Oh Haji and Okamura Natsue. In Japan, I am often asked which name I use. My Japanese family name, Okamura, was forced on us by history, and my Korean family name, Oh, is in our family tree. But both names are mine, so I use them both. I began to use them in public, with pride, eight years ago. I am both of these names."

Throughout her childhood, Oh studied in Japanese public schools where she was never presented any opportunities to learn the Korean language or the complicated history between Korea and Japan—an education system that the artist says has created a social space that discourages both ethnic groups to speak about the topic. However, the artist grew up with an awareness both of her position as a Zainichi member of Japanese society as well as the social discrimination that comes with being associated with Zainichi communities. She continued to learn about her transnational ancestry from her family, discovering that her identity as a Zainichi Korean could only ever be considered as an "Other" in Japan's social structure, a dilemma that she felt compelled to address through her artistic practice.

Wedding Dress for Minority Race (2000)

For Wedding Dress for Minority Race, Oh deconstructed a used Japanese kimono and reconstructed it into a Korean hanbok dress that would typically be worn for a wedding ceremony. Oh also used fabric from a nagajuban, the slip worn beneath a kimono, to fashion a red undergarment that viewers could glimpse beneath the finished hanbok.

Oh created this piece during the final year of her undergraduate degree. Although chima jeogori were often worn by Koreans residing in Japan for different ceremonies such as weddings, commencements, and coming-of-age-ceremonies, the outfit would inevitably reveal the wearers' identity as Zainichi, inviting negative social and sexual associations about Korean women within Japanese society. Oh placed red flower petals made from silk on the ground surrounding the dress, and on each petal the artist had meticulously stitched the lyrics from an old Korean song in katakana (Japanese alphabet primarily used for the pronunciation of foreign words). Shortly after her grandmother's passing, Oh left Japan for Seoul to study Korean and traditional Korean textiles and stitching techniques from 2002-2004.

The centerpiece of the installation was a large, sheer organdy skirt with a long train that spread itself across the floor. On one wall, Oh also hung three black and white photographs of her grandmother’s jeogori as a way to produce soft, yet striking images that conveyed a sense of her grandmother's bodily presence in the exhibition space.

The artist created Inside her Skirt as a way to offer "redress" for her own youthful obliviousness to her grandmother's linguistic isolation as a Japanese resident who could not speak Japanese well—literally "re-clothing" the memory of her grandmother by undertaking the meticulous process of imprinting the skirt with the floral pattern by hand. Without a way to communicate, Oh had never learned much about her grandmother's life or feelings. Although they had a shared an identity as Zainichi Koreans living in Japan, Oh and her grandmother shared little else until her death, when the artist wondered how she must have felt about her life in Japan and decided to explore the "gaps" and "silences" in their past communication.