ART BASEL HONG KONG

With each stitch made meticulously by hand, Oki engraves stories of life onto textiles. Engaging with used fabric, different types of threads, found objects, and her own embroidery, Oki’s practice is a meditative and painstaking one that stitches together histories, chronologies, narratives, and sentiments, while rejecting the structured conventions of embroidery. Her embroidery takes shape in abstract patterns, motifs, and forms, forging a singular artistic identity that reflects the physical and emotional intensity of her work.

Working with the duality of stitching as decoration and as practical application, and with a lineage of stitching techniques that historically developed in Japan, Oki freely adopts different methods while remaining aware of the purposes they served or the necessities from which they developed. Separated from its practical and decorative circumstances, her embroidery is uninhibited, stitched without a preliminary sketch or clear intention, guided solely by the unwinding of her mind.

Her work also draws on the practice of assemblage, with materials ranging from ‘boro’ (textiles that have been mended or patched together) to more than 100-year-old ‘furoshiki’ (traditional wrapping cloths), window frames, wooden wash pans, and vintage designer clothes. Oki treats every material as a serendipitous encounter, each of which is inevitably entangled with unique stories of ownership, purpose, temporality, and locality. She carefully stitches together the distinct histories and chronologies in which these objects previously existed to create pieces that become vessels of renewed life and meaning. While maintaining an awareness of the cultural and social contexts from which they arose, she remains committed to identifying with her work on a personal level, channeling an animistic connection with these materials.

Using imperfect, secondhand materials necessitates accepting wear and fading, which extends to her attitude with stitching – incorporating accidental knots, tangles, and ruptures. She draws on traditional Japanese practices such as ‘yobitsugi,’ a ceramic craft in which pieces of broken vessels are patched together to create new works, and ‘kintsugi,’ which uses lacquer and gold leaf to mend ceramic items, both underscoring a continuance of histories and reuse of pre-existing items. Oki seeks to ‘mix’ her embroidery with pre-existing objects in an attempt to add to their stories and maintain a delicate co-existence between the past and the present.