Upcoming:
Mika Obayashi at NADA New York
TD Bank Curated Spotlight | Booth C13
May 13-17 2026

5U Space is pleased to present a solo booth of new works by Mika Obayashi for NADA New York 2026. Paper made as a fellow at Dieu Donné and sculptures crafted from found materials create an uncanny sense of space that interrogates the boundary between the temporal and the eternal, the physical and the intangible. Functioning like diagrams, these new works reveal rather than represent their meanings.

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.

Checklist

I began my fellowship at Dieu Donné knowing that I wanted to make flat work. My previous work in handmade paper was sculptural: I would make sheets of paper, dry them, and thread them within a grid of strings to create installations. I was curious what could happen if I constrained myself to the flat surface of a piece of paper.

The papermaking process begins with beating plant fibers into pulp. In Western papermaking, this is done in a Hollander beater, a loud metal machine filled with water that cycles the pulp between the drum and bed plate, which gradually pulls the fibers apart. Next, a vat is filled with pulp and water. A mould and deckle are used to scoop the pulp from the vat, and the metal screen of the mould allows for the water to drain from the newly formed sheet. The fibers felt together with a little shake of the mould in order to create a strong sheet. The sheet is then laid down, or couched, onto a felt. Here, when the sheet is still wet, is where most of the techniques that Dieu Donné specializes in can happen.

I learned how to create blowouts, a process by which a wet sheet of paper is partially covered by a stencil and a hose is used to spray away the pulp that is not covered. I found I could create imagery that was embedded in a sheet — the consistency of one type of paper, an opaque dark cotton mix, could be interrupted with a thin bit of translucent abaca to create a contrast that was not just an image but a material reality. I arrived at a form of drawing that relied on bits of string dipped in pulp paint (very finely beaten pigmented linen) and laid down on the wet sheet to create thin lines. I had several consistencies of pulp paint and just as many types of string to create a variety of lines. All the layers and lines of pulp paint are pressed together in a hydraulic press and bond to each other, forming one sheet of paper. In these works, the substrate and the means of mark-making become the same thing. Each is unique and 100% paper.

A handmade piece of paper will tell how it was made: how the pulp was beaten and for how long, what kind of pulp, how the sheet was formed, and how it dried. Paper is finicky and sensitive and almost has a mind of its own. There is no certainty in papermaking; there is just decreasing uncertainty. Rather than simply executing my own vision, I am working with the material to discover what is possible.

The sculptures here ground the fantastical nature of the drawings: they contend with the forces of gravity, light, and scale. They are made from discarded material and therefore deal, too, with the reality of excess. When working with found objects, I try to allow a work to come into an existence that simply is something. I imagine that the work makes itself, and I act as a conduit for material to be reconfigured. This necessitates that the concept is the same as the physical thing itself: it means exactly what it is.

In reading about diagrams, I have been considering how knowledge is presented and organized, how scale becomes a factor in a 2D or 3D object, and how viewers bring their own expertise to an object. Like diagrams, the works in the show are not merely a catalogue of parts; they generate understanding by eliciting observation of those parts in new and unpredictable re-formations.

By reaching into what feels like a spiritual realm of material that calls attention to its agency and history, I humble the human by positioning them between the cosmic and intimate scales simultaneously. The works here are knowable in their materiality, but somehow (in their proximity, configuration, context) reveal the infinite potential of things, gesturing forward and backward in time but with a singular now function.