ART BASEL IN BASEL 2025

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, stitched without a preliminary sketch or clear intention, is guided solely by the unwinding of her mind and takes shape in abstract patterns, motifs, and forms, forging a singular artistic identity that reflects the physical and emotional intensity of her work.

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.

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, underscoring a continuance of histories and reuse of pre-existing items. Oki seeks to “mix” her embroidery with pre-existing materials in an attempt to add to their stories and maintain a delicate co-existence between the past and the present.

Oki’s practice was inspired by the life of her mother, who was herself a longtime practitioner of needlework, making clothes for her children and running her own sewing class. When she passed away in 1996, she left behind a trove of valuable old textiles, thread, and needles, which Oki didn’t dare touch. Years later Oki’s young daughter, oblivious to her mother’s hesitance towards these prized possessions, created a small hand bag with the materials as a birthday present for Oki. Although taken aback at first, this taught the artist that treasured items could be transformed into something even more valuable, and the importance of the pure will to create. This experience prompted Oki to begin her creative practice as an artist in earnest. While her mother was sewing for her family, Oki asserts that she sews for herself. The presentation includes a baby dress that her mother made, and to which she added her embroidery, mixing her own time with her mother’s.

Oki has provided the following statement regarding the presentation.

My work is in embroidery. Defying the conventional image of embroidery, my work is only completed by stitching into place the passage of time.

The origin of my work is with my mother. I embroider using my hands, with the presence and memories of both my mother as she was when she was alive and my mother after she passed away sublimated within me. Now that I have reached the age of my mother’s death, I have come to a new phase in my life. This is where I begin again.

This presentation for Art Basel 2025 will consist of approximately 16 works by Junko Oki.