11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Seabird Habitats 2022 / Linen (plainwoven, warp-faced, pick-up patterned, four-selvedge cloth), lead, hook, slide projection / Seven panels: 300 × 41cm (each); 300 x 287cm (installed); floor projection 550 x 400cm; installed dimensions variable / Courtesy: The artist / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Collection NOTES 1 This period encompassed a series of treaties that began with the forced opening of Korean ports and the granting of extraterritorial rights to Japan in 1876, through incorporation as a Japanese government protectorate in 1905, and formal annexation between 1910 and 1945. 2 The Treaty of San Francisco, also called the Treaty of Peace with Japan, which came into effect in 1952, re-established peaceful relations between Japan and the Allied Powers on behalf of the United Nations, and stipulated that Japan should recognise Korea’s independence and renounce all rights, titles and claims to Korea. One effect was that Korean residents in Japan lost their automatic right to Japanese citizenship. 3 Arrowsmith’s map is held in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Oh sourced other images from the collections of the National Library of Australia and the Australian War Memorial, in Canberra, and the State Library of Queensland. 4 Haji Oh, statement to the author, February 2024. Haji Oh’s textile installation Seabird Habitats 2022 consists of a single tableau of seven suspended woven panels, mapping the entanglement of Korean labour in the history of colonialism in the Asia Pacific region. A third‑generation member of Japan’s Zainichi Korean community and a recent migrant to Australia, Oh uses the techniques and materials of weaving as a platform for exploring experiences of dispossession, dispersion and migration, and the complexities of personal identity that ensue. One of Japan’s most significant ethnic minorities, Zainichi trace their family histories to Korea under various stages of Japanese government rule between 1876 and 1945, and the immediate aftermath of World War Two. 1 Their identity has been complicated by the annulment of their Japanese nationality by the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, the division of the Korean Peninsula, and shifting levels of acceptance within mainstream society. 2 Accordingly, Oh was raised as a Japanese Special Permanent Resident, while retaining South Korean citizenship. The passing of her grandmother, who was transmigrated from her ancestral home on the Korean island of Jeju to Osaka in the 1930s, precipitated an interest in exploring obscured histories of migration, alongside considerations of the artist’s own dual identity, through material practice. Using weaving, dyeing, tying and stitching techniques, Oh draws on personal narratives and photographic archives in her evocative textile installations that incorporate mapping and patterning. The act of weaving is central to her working through difficult material and memories, where the process of tracing a subject is mediated by the relationship between warp and weft. Weaving for Oh is at once an artistic language and a structure of support. For her ongoing ‘Grand-mother Island Project’, tracking the movement of unnamed individuals across the seas, Oh uses a backstrap loom, which requires the weaver’s own body to hold the tension in the warp thread, endowing the process with metaphors of embodiment, entanglement and personal implication. In Seabird Habitats , this technique is used to create points of connection between histories of occupation, indenture and migration. During Japan’s imperial period, Korean, Taiwanese and other subjects were dispatched to labour in pearling and guano industries in British, German and Japanese colonial territories, from the Izu Islands off Japan’s east coast to Queensland’s Torres Strait and Nauru in the Pacific Ocean. Oh layers cyanotypes of historical imagery of these landscapes with a weave of a eucalypt forest near her home in Wollongong. The resulting panels are suspended using a system of traditional knots and lines weighted with fishing sinkers, completed with a slide of British cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith’s colonial-era Chart of the Pacific Ocean 1798 projected downward on the gallery floor. 3 Seabirds provide a rich metaphor for Oh’s investigations. Seabird hunting and guano mining played significant roles in colonial expansion in the Pacific, with damaging effects on indigenous populations, systems of labour and ocean environments. With its guano deposits exhausted, Nauru now hosts one of the Australian Government’s controversial offshore processing centres for refugees and asylum seekers. Even the free migrations of seabirds, with their habitual nesting spots, continue to be threatened by habitat destruction from commercial development and extractive industries. Oh notes that through exploitation and the threats posed by climate change, the archival photographs used as source imagery in her weave — principally Australian naval records — depict landscapes that no longer exist; like Arrowsmith’s map, they are also records of invasion and the colonial gaze. 4 Referencing her family’s history of indenture, and her status as a recent migrant to Australia, Haji Oh proposes weaving as a space where these complexities can be mediated, where past and present can come together, and new, less exploitative relationships can be imagined. REUBENKEEHAN BORN 1976, OSAKA, JAPAN LIVES+WORKS INWOLLONGONG, DHARAWALCOUNTRY, AUSTRALIA HAJI OH ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 162 — 163