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Home is where the art is for Finnish photographer
By Christine Laskowski (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-08 11:02
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 Beijing-based Finnish photographer and artist Milla-Kariina Oja.
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Milla-Kariina Oja's latest exhibition explores the boundaries between our public and private spaces
Finnish photographer and conceptual artist Milla-Kariina Oja's exhibition, Home - Project uses simplified models of houses to reflect on our concept of public and private spaces.
As a native of Oulu, a city in northern Finland with a population of 100,000, this artistic choice makes perfect sense.
"If you think about my country, it's as big as England but there are only 5 million people. So there is a lot of space," said Oja.
But she is the first to admit that the whole concept began with a foray into dressmaking.
"I started to think about one's own space and conceptually one's space in the world," she explained. "So I initially started with dresses that had different shapes, because I thought the dress is like our second skin, so it's kind of our first 'space'."
Oja cannot recall exactly how her exploration of space made the transition from dresses to houses, but soon she wanted to transform the idea of home into an image of home.
"So then I started thinking about this very simplified image of a house which a child would draw," she began. "I thought, 'Okay, I take this because everyone relates to that as an example and then that grew into this idea of a little home in a vast landcape."
Oja began what was to become Home - Project in 2008 and admits the process was quite complicated.
She built up a lot of different houses, from paper, from plastic and a lot of miniatures.
She finally settled on the stark, frame house model she uses in the exhibition. "At first I was also trying to find this beautiful dream location to build my house. And then it changed, I started to put it in not so beautiful places."
The exhibition features 18 medium and large-scale photographs along with three video instillations and it is Oja's first solo show in Beijing.
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Border of A City, a photograph from Oja's solo show in Beijing entitled Home-Project. |
The locations of her photos range from the a remote Ming Dynasty village located on a tiny island in Liaoning called Xinchang to the metropolitan.
The exhibition conveys both the angst of urbanization (a simple red home that is somehow surviving as others are being torn down) and the fragility of the world we live in. 
Oja who moved to Beijing in 2006 as an established artist, with a catalogue of work from her time in Barcelona and Manchester, told METRO that this career path initially began as a desire to study something practical.
"I was always based in performing arts, musical theater and dance and thought I would be an actress," she recalled. "But I was flipping through a prospectus book in high school and I thought photography was more practical."
Oja talks about her art as an ongoing response to life.
"It's a way to react to my life and everything that's surrounding me," she said. "I feel a little bit like I am writing my story. And I know I couldn't stop doing it. Even when there's economic problems I'm never going to stop doing it."
