Mika Obayashi is a fiber and sculpture artist from Troy, Michigan. She earned her BA from Amherst College in 2019 and her MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture in 2025. She served as the 2025-26 West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY.
Space On Space: First off, congrats on your invitation to participate in NADA NY 2026 with 5U Space! I’m curious how you and Leo from 5U Space originally got connected to each other? Is there anything you can share publicly about the presentation at NADA?
Mika Obayashi: Thank you! Last year, during my MFA thesis show, I happened to be in the Tyler galleries at the same time that Leo came to look at the shows. He gave me his business card, we had a studio visit, and then later I went to check out the gallery. We had several long conversations about art, the scene in Philly, and what was missing, and I found we had a lot of shared visions about what is possible. I respect his ambition, and I think he is becoming an important voice in the Philly art scene, and beyond.
At NADA, I will be showing flat paper works I made at Dieu Donné in the last six months during the West Bay View Fellowship, as well as some new sculptures from found materials. I arrived at a form of “drawing” within the papermaking process that connects back to my sculptures, and I’m excited to be able to show them at the same time.
SOS: Art fairs are loud, crowded, relentless. Your work is quiet, precise, meditative. How do you approach presenting something that asks for stillness in that context?
MO: Hopefully, my work could act as a foil to the general chaos of the fair. In this setting, and in any other gallery setting, I like to consider layers of engagement, like what can be gleaned with a passing glance, what can be understood from ten feet away, what’s the experience of viewing up close? Every layer gives something different. So even within the loudness of the fair, I think some quieter moments could push through. Because we have access to constant stimulation through our phones, it is sometimes more effective to do less than it is to do more.
SOS: Your work has been described as needing “empty space” as a central ingredient. How do you think about absence—not just as negative space, but as an active material in your installations?
MO: Space is absolutely an active material. When there is a lot of empty air around something hanging, you start to notice gravity in a way that you might not have before. When two things are side by side with a tiny sliver of space between, it can lead to tension. An object weightless in space lends to a metaphoric lightness and levity.
Putting space between things can also make something see-through, or slightly see-through. I often conflate the physical translucency of an object with honesty, as in something is honest in its materiality, its function. And this is something I try to bring to my work: a feeling of it being true or right while operating on its own internal logic. And again, less is more. Sometimes I’ll create a sculpture, and the real work comes in the form of taking away materials to give it more room to breathe rather than building it out.
SOS: From the images I saw online, your work at 5U Space in What is Sacred was so immersive that it became almost invisible within the rugged walls of the gallery. How did you and Leo collaborate on this show? Where did his curatorial hand end and your installation work begin?
MO: The original conception of the show was to re-present some works from my thesis, and Leo encouraged me to incorporate some new works that responded to the space itself. Part of the beauty of that space is the view out the windows to City Hall and the William Penn statue. I started reading about the Curse of Billy Penn, which I won’t get into here, but it’s a wonderful series of events that got me thinking about a hierarchy of space where the higher something is, the more exalted, hence why a church steeple was once the tallest point of any town. The highest building in Philly is the Comcast Center.
Since my thesis show, I’ve been more aware of the three strata of an enclosed gallery space: the floor, what’s at eye-level, and what is above the head. Because I was considering the symbolic significance of height as it related to the William Penn statue, it made sense to also consider the strata of the gallery space itself, and Leo and I spoke a lot about this and the placement of works within vertical space.
SOS: I’ve noticed several items on your CV tied to Japan, including two solo/two-person exhibitions, a residency experience in 2020 at Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan, and it looks like you studied there for a bit. Can you share a bit about your experiences in Japan and how they’ve shaped/informed your practice?
MO: I traveled to various hand papermaking studios in Japan the summer before my final year of undergrad. My dad is from Japan, but the last time I was there, I was too young to remember it. Those several months informed the work I made when I came back (my undergrad thesis), not just in technique but also in a sensitivity to material possibility.
Later, through a fellowship between Amherst College and Doshisha University, I helped teach English and enrolled as a research student at Kyoto Seika University. Japan is endlessly fascinating because on the one hand, you have the history and tradition, great food, cherry blossoms, etc. Then, on the other hand, there are salarymen passed out drunk on the train, compulsory homogeneity, racism…It’s a complicated place like any other. To take only beauty and leave the rest is disingenuous. I think I was first inspired by the sensitivity to nature that can be seen in any park or garden in Japan, but what keeps my interest is the complexity–the extremes and the gray areas all coexisting.
SOS: You make your own paper by hand. Walk us through that process—what does it feel like to build something so immaterial and fragile from scratch, and how does that labor live in the finished work?
MO: Every step of the papermaking process is evident in the finished sheet. What plant fiber, how it was beaten, how the sheet was formed, how it was dried… every variable has an incredible impact on the finished product. With every new technique I learn in paper, the possibilities of the material open up endlessly. Paper is finicky and demands a gentle touch, but the resulting works can also be dimensional and robust.
SOS: Is there a conceptual or symbolic reason for using paper other than its material qualities as something thin and fragile?
MO: When I first learned to make paper, I felt I had stumbled upon a parallel world: paper first appears ubiquitous and banal, but just below the surface lies a deep and lush history, one inseparable from human progress. I like paper for its unassuming nature and that it immediately ties me to a long history of craftspeople. When paper became widely available, so did printed text, books, and knowledge. I like to think of it as a key step in how we have intellectually evolved as humans. Now, with the digitization and dematerialization of daily life, things that are handmade become all the more significant and precious. It is increasingly important to preserve paper in the name of tradition, and simultaneously advance the medium in new ways in the name of art.
Paper is often a communal activity, and papermakers so willingly and excitedly share their knowledge with others. Art practices can often be isolating, so paper feels like my lifeline to other people. What do we have if not each other?
SOS: Other than NADA, what are you currently working on? Any shows we should keep on our radar coming up?
MO: I’ll have a show in NYC with Dieu Donné in the fall, and I’m working on sculptural display methods for flat paper works. I’m also working on hanging out with my friends: Amanda Crain-Freeland, Paolo Mentasti, and Heather Swenson. They all maintain studios in Philly and are doing great work. Paolo has a two-person show coming up at Grizzly Grizzly this June, which should be on your radar.
I think nothing can be something. The empty space in these works seems like a really intriguing concept!