Mika Obayashi
What Is Sacred

28 June - 9 August 2025
Opening reception: Saturday 28 June 2-6pm

5U Space is pleased to announce its fifth exhibition, Mika Obayashi, What Is Sacred. The collection of sculpture work is the artist’s first presentation at the gallery and her first solo-exhibition in Philadelphia.

Through restrained provocations of hand-crafted, found, and fabricated materials, the exhibition explores traditional meanings imposed on discrete objects while engaging new possibilities of understanding. Featuring five sculptures that highlight the artist's multidisciplinary practice, Obayashi uses floor, ceiling, wall, and window to connect ideological hierarchies with spatial ones.

Checklist

I don’t believe in god, but I believe in the tiny spark that happens when disparate objects meet and somehow make sense. I believe in the latent intelligence of things.

An ethereal current runs through the world. Neither sacred nor profane, the force can reveal itself through inanimate objects. A wish, a blessing, a curse, manifest physically simply because the belief is strong enough.

In the room are five works that I made in response to material and place. I’m searching for a feeling that is bigger than myself, and I find that feeling everywhere, in any object and through any window.

This is an attempt towards a decentralized experience of spirituality, or perhaps an effort to love a world that is so full of things.

Mika Obayashi
June 2025

Mika Obayashi (b.1995) 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. Obayashi has shown her work at GalleryGallery (Kyoto, Japan), Jewett Gallery at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA), Carvalho Park (Brooklyn, NY), Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, NY), Fjord (Philadelphia, PA), and Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia, PA), among others. She is the recipient of grants from the American Craft Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Obayashi has attended residencies at Studio Kura and Women’s Studio Workshop with a residency forthcoming at Vermont Studio Center. This fall she will serve as the 2025-26 West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY.