Biography
Their work is currently represented by SENSE GALLERY (Berlin) and K:art Studio (London). Recipient of First Prize at the KANE Art Prize 2025 (awarded 2026) and the Curator's Choice Award at Blackdot Gallery in partnership with London Design Festival (2025), Ohata was also selected as a Finalist for the Ingram Prize (2024), elected as a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (2024), and had work acquired by the Adamovskiy Foundation (2024). They have twice received Arts and Culture Grants from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (2022, 2025), presented the artist talk Reimagining the Human Body at Tate Modern (2023), and participated in the FUSION Artist Residency at BnA_WALL, Tokyo (2026), and KunstRAI, Amsterdam (2026).
Ohata earned an MA (Distinction) in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art, London (2023), following a BA (First-Class Honours) in Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2019).
Ohata’s practice explores identity politics and posthuman philosophy shaped by lived experiences of child abuse, gender struggle, and discrimination tied to their Asian heritage. Working with prosthetics-making methodologies, they develop sculptural installations that merge wearable artificial skin with hyperreal, life-sized forms, drawing on the folklore of Japanese yōkai to imagine hybrid bodies and alternative embodiments.
Their work considers how cultural identity and collective memory are carried by the body, inscribed in skin as both surface and threshold. By reconfiguring seams, skins, and interfaces, Ohata blurs boundaries between self and other, human and non-human, material and body, opening spaces for intimacy, empathy, and calibrated touch, rehearsing the ethics of contact. Within this expanded field of embodiment, they attend to underrepresented identities and voices, inviting overlooked forms and narratives to become present and legible.
Ohata regards art as an extension of the body, a means to hold trauma and transformation while testing the fluidity of personhood. In this process, they question the role of artists in interrupting cycles of harm and ask what makes a body relatable.