Haori

From afar, Haori reads as a pale jacket shape hovering quietly on ropes, its sleeves held open like a diagram. Light skims the surface and slips through it, so the garment appears more like atmosphere than cloth. The outline is recognisably a kimono, yet its skin feels clinical—neither fashion display nor museum specimen. Looking from afar, the viewer trusts the silhouette. Looking up close, the surface breaks into pores, folds, and faint pigmentation, as if touch has been pressed flat and archived. The work names this confrontation as a posthuman intimacy. This is not armour or skin, but armour and skin mutually generating each other. Haori frames Megumi Ohata’s fabrication as an ethics of contact; it argues that material can hold memory without fixing identity.

Silicone, pigment, and thread form the work’s baseline grammar, with the “textile” produced by imprinting the artist’s own skin texture into silicone, then stitching it into a haori structure. It cites it to fill in the gaps: RCA records that in 2021, Ohata developed this artificial skin textile technique, realised in Haori. It cites it to fill in the gaps: Ohata lists Haori within the Wearable Skin Series (2021–24), made from silicone, pigment, and thread. The method folds special-effects craft into slow textile labour, turning a prosthetic material into something sewn, hung, and lived with. Suspended rather than worn, the haori behaves like a shell that refuses closure: it occupies air, casts a soft shadow, and makes the viewer circle it, returning to the pressure-point—protection versus exposure.

The surface also carries a story. It cites it to develop the context: Blackdot Gallery frames Haori as a contemporary interpretation of Hyakkiyakou Emaki, the picture scroll of Yōkai processions. Folklore is not illustrated here; it is embedded as a behavioural logic—layers that look calm from a distance and become uncanny at close range. The viewer’s empathy is tested through thresholds: what appears comforting as clothing becomes strange as epidermis, re-stitching the claim that armour is only believable when it admits softness.

Installation details sharpen the stakes. It cites it to point out what existing arguments have missed: the work is shown with casts of Ohata’s feet, suspended like ghosts, linking “floating” to displacement and childhood trauma. Weight is held by rope, seams bear strain, and repair reads as a visible action. What remains is a hovering boundary that never settles, a thin seam-line catching light.