Milla-Kariina Oja is a Finnish artist who has been based in Beijing for the past 4 years.
 
HOME - PROJECT is the artist's first solo show in Beijing. The exhibition reflects on the concept of home. In this recent work, the artist studies the vital space of human beings by photographing the universal and even a clichéd "image" of a house. She places a simple house-shaped model made out of wood and fabric in different locations to observe the relationship between the house and the chosen place.
 
The house appears in various Chinese outdoor settings – on mountains, in the middle of a desert, on the outskirts of a Chinese city, and in Finland by lakesides and in forests.
 
The exhibition consists of 18 medium and large-scale photographs and three video pieces. The video works record the locations where the houses were previously photographed, and then removed, leaving empty landscapes.
 
MILLA-KARIINA OJA left Finland at the age of 19 and studied photography art at Manchester Metropolitan University from 1996 to 1999. While working towards her BA degree she went to Spain as an exchange student to study at the University of Castilla- La Mancha in Cuenca. After graduating from Manchester she moved to Spain where she continued her studies in a Ph.D. program at the University of Barcelona in the faculty of fine art.
 
In 2003, Oja had her first solo exhibition in a prominent gallery, Galeria Ferran Cano, in Barcelona. Since then, her works have been exhibited in galleries, photography art centers and museums in Europe. Her previous solo exhibition, Cat's Cradle, was shown in China for the first time at the Lianzhou International Photography festival in 2006. The same work was later exhibited in Beijing at the Zenith Gallery in a show together with Chinese photographer Jiang Pengyi.