Sangmin Oh

Sangmin Oh treats textile as a planetary skin, intertwining land, climate, memory, and nonhuman life into material form. Instead of a mere surface, textile functions as a responsive structure that senses and reorganizes environmental changes, material cycles, and unseen life. Grounded in the land – a living field of accumulated time, damage, and recovery – his work translates the conditions of mountains, terrains, and damaged sites into woven, knitted, and tensioned forms, utilizing a spectrum of media from natural materials like wool and ramie to modern elements such as nylon, metal, plastic, and discarded matter.

For him, ecology is a realm of friction, coexistence, and regeneration. His practice highlights how soil, air, light, water, plants, and invisible forces actively shape our world, transforming materials into a medium for sensing more-than-human relations. Recent works extend into questions of spirit, viewed as a sensory residue between place, matter, and buried stories. Through repetition, tension, and looseness, he imagines how humans might live deeply entangled with the world.

He received the Textiel Museum Tilburg’s Young Talent Award in 2022 and has been supported by Cultuur Eindhoven, Stichting Stokroos, and the Stimuleringsfonds, among others. Selected exhibitions include “Undo DMZ” (Paju, 2025), “Re;Collective: Materials” (Seoul, 2025); “Soil to Soul” (Seoul, 2024) and “Secrets of Making III” (Tilburg, 2023).

Sangmin Oh is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2026/27.