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.

Her textile installation Seabird Habitats 2022 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.

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.