Textile installation draws on personal narratives & photographic archives

Sun 27 Apr 2025

Haji Oh's textile installation Seabird Habitats 2022 installed in the eleventh Asia Pacific Triennial, is a single tableau of seven suspended woven panels that map the entanglement of Korean labour in the history of colonialism in the Asia Pacific region.

During Japan’s imperial period, Korean subjects were despatched to work 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 the weave of a eucalypt forest near her home in Wollongong, New South Wales.

Haji Oh installing Seabird Habitats 2022

A third-generation member of Japan’s Zainichi Korean community and a recent migrant to Australia, Haji Oh uses the techniques and materials of weaving as a platform to explore dispossession, dispersion and migration, and the complexities of personal identity that ensue from these experiences.

Seabird hunting and guano mining played significant roles in colonial expansion in the Pacific but destroyed the habitats the birds once flew freely between. With its guano deposits exhausted, Nauru continues to host one of Australia’s controversial offshore processing centres for asylum seekers. 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.

This project is assisted by the Ishibashi Foundation and the National Center for Art Research, Japan

Edited extract from the publication The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, 2024

Asia Pacific Triennial
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry

Asia Pacific Triennial Extended
View this work at GOMA until 13 July