KOSAKU KANECHIKA is pleased to present “anthology” by Junko Oki at Art Basel Unlimited 2026 from June 18th to June 21st, 2026.

Oki engraves stories of life onto textiles, with each stitch placed meticulously by hand. Her embroidery is uninhibited, stitched without a preliminary sketch or intention, but guided solely by the unwinding of her mind. Her materials range from boro (textiles that have been mended or patched) to more than 100-year-old furoshiki (traditional wrapping cloths), wooden gold wash pans, and vintage designer clothes. Oki treats each material as a serendipitous encounter, 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.

The project at Unlimited is an adaptation of a work that was originally conceived as a site-specific installation for the Aichi Triennale 2025. The setting for this work was a relocated traditional thatched roof house, the workshop of Tatsukichi Fujii, a central figure in Japan’s modern kogei (arts and crafts) movement. The space was surrounded by monuments to those who lost their lives in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, and in World War II. The central theme of her work was “prayer.”

Oki gives the title “anthology” to installations created in connection with others. In 2020, for her solo exhibition at the Hagi Uragami Museum, the artist presented an installation that included around 7,000 spools of thread donated from all over Japan, many of which were imbued with personal memories. At Aichi last year, the installation incorporated approximately 170,000 donated used needles embedded inside blocks made of local clay from the Seto area. Depicting a scene of collective prayer, these sculptures evoked the custom of “hari-kuyō,” a memorial service held to show appreciation for worn out needles that have outlived their usefulness in which the needles are laid to rest in pieces of tofu. Visitors were also invited to freely add their own embroidery in red thread on a roll of cloth, recalling the protective charm known as “sennin-bari,” a belt of cloth women gave to soldiers going off to war sewn with one thousand red stitches, typically each sewn by a different woman. In the final years of World War II, this practice was banned because expressing hope that soldiers would return home safely was deemed counter to the spirit of the war effort. Oki’s works render visible a history in which even prayer was forbidden, while also conveying a sense of healing through the warmth of the materials themselves and the connections across time that these materials bring about.

Oki started her embroidery practice with materials left behind by her mother, who ran a sewing class. One of her enduring sources of inspiration has been a school uniform that her grandmother made for her daughter (Oki’s mother), when goods were in short supply during World War II, by patching together undergarments and her husband’s pants, and producing the white lines at the collar and sleeves by stitching up and down in white thread. Oki’s work builds on the extensive personal and collective histories of needlework by women conducted as a means of survival, prayer, and perseverance.

We cordially invite you to visit the presentation at Art Basel Unlimited 2026, which is the largest-scale installation the artist has created to date.