Megumi Ohata

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Megumi Ohata is an interdisciplinary artist and prosthetics technician for film and television of Japanese and Korean heritage, working between London and Tokyo. Combining artificial skin textiles imprinted with the texture of their own skin with prosthetic fabrication methods and hyperreal sculptural techniques, they create sculptures, installations, moving-image works, and performances exploring embodiment, identity, cultural inheritance, trauma, and posthumanism. Ohata’s practice examines identity politics and posthuman philosophy through lived experiences of child abuse, gender struggle, and discrimination tied to their Asian heritage. Drawing on Japanese yōkai folklore, they develop hybrid bodies and alternative embodiments that destabilise fixed distinctions between human and non-human, self and other, body and material. Their work considers how cultural identity and collective memory are carried by and inscribed upon the body, with skin functioning as both surface and threshold. Through seams, skins, prosthetic interfaces, and acts of wearing or shedding, Ohata creates spaces for intimacy, empathy, and calibrated touch, using bodily transformation to rehearse the ethics of contact. Within this expanded field of embodiment, they attend to underrepresented identities and experiences, allowing overlooked forms and narratives to become materially present. Ohata regards art as an extension of the body: a means of holding trauma and transformation while testing the...

Artwork