Viewers entering visual artist Kallol Datta’s solo exhibition at Experimenter, Mumbai, encounter 15 floating jeogoris— unisex Korean garments intended to cover the arms and upper body—suspended from the ceiling, their wearers absent. These multicoloured reconstructions are made of silk, cotton,  polyester and many other fabrics; their colours denoting the social standing and mobility of their wearer. Datta's exhibition, Volume IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies, interrogates clothing, both ancient and modern, to reveal information about the people who wore them and cultural attitudes about fashion, morality, gender, censorship and the human body. Like the previous volumes in this series, the Indian artist, researcher and clothing designer draws inspiration from the history of the Korean Peninsula and Japan from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Volume IV is based on the text Lessons for Women, written by Ban Zhao, the first known female historian in China; she lived during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 9 AD, 25 – 220 AD). It prescribed values like tranquillity, unhurried composure, chastity and quietude for women and has continued to inform gender roles and appearances over several centuries in East Asia. To Datta, these edicts—religious, imperial, legal, social—felt familiar. In a conversation with STIR, he said, “I have been researching clothing practices native to SWANA [Southwest Asia and North Africa], South Asia, the Korean Peninsula and Japan for over a decade now. To mine more information about clothing, I look at the literature, historical texts, excavated samples and ‘laws of the land’...In 2022, I came across Lessons for Women. The text seemed current. It wouldn’t seem out of place at a political rally today.” The lens of these historical societies became a way to interrogate contemporary norms of clothing, gender, class, caste and social hierarchies.  Datta intervenes and retells the stories of these archival textiles, sewing subversive messages on them, recreating historical advertising posters and their harsh decency codes and creating fabric portraits of people from marginalised groups.

Jeogoris form the first chapter of the show—Truths Our Clothes Told Us—and contain stories about belonging, alienation, power and social status told through colour, pattern and fabric. For example, only married women who had borne male children were permitted to wear purple, and certain patterned textiles signalled membership to a particular clan. Datta crafted the reconstructions meticulously, matching their dimensions exactly to historical pieces in museums in South Korea. The textiles used in the show are vintage and come from the artist’s personal collection, gathered globally over the years. “The donations I receive are accompanied by notes, interviews and images from family albums of the donors. These items of clothing hold memories, are bearers of witness – to episodic events and societal changes,” said Datta, discussing his archive. Working with textiles became a unique way to research lived histories and engage with a medium that is often underrepresented in contemporary art and Indian art because of its associations with women and craft. Much of the multimedia artist’s work (including the pieces in this exhibition) is created in collaboration with craftswomen from the Ek Tara Foundation, who work as tailors and textile designers, collaborating with stores, designers and artists.

Half-Truths Our Clothes Told Us moves from textiles to the media and visual art surrounding them: advertisements, style catalogues and the censorship edicts they were subject to. A culmination of Datta’s long-term research into Japan’s Meiji (1868 – 1912), Taishō (1912 onward) and Shōwa (1926 – 1989) periods, the fabric recreations are scattered with small, sewn-in words, disguised as embroidery. The words range from research on the garments and their history to lines lifted from advertising posters and laws. In some places, words like ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ and ‘conduct’ repeat like a provocation. In Poster 06 and Poster 07, Datta reimagines an alternate history, rewriting moral and style codes with genders switched in bold lines like, “Since a man should mostly stay indoors and do all the housework, the ‘jeogori’ is still used as his outer garment.”

The hibiscus and camellia flower motifs dotting the exhibition may seem traditional enough, but their layered symbolism makes them anything but. Korea’s national flower, the hibiscus, was used as a symbol of resistance by freedom fighters during Japan’s colonisation of Korea (1910 – 1945) and the country’s recent feminist movement. While camellias have always been associated with femininity and grace, they have been used as symbols of liberatory movements and sexual independence worldwide. The flowers bloom out of the heads of figures, emerging from backgrounds, quietly resisting the advertisement text they are paired with. In using them, Datta links femininity and strength, dissent and autonomy, countering the passive, obedient picture of femininity that the exhibition’s historical references point to.

Datta is also interested in how space is marked and transformed by identity, a theme taken up in the second half of the exhibition. Half-Lies Our Clothes Told Us includes Surveying Edo—nine monochromatic maps (created using reconstructed kimonos and saris) that plot the prescribed dwellings and movements of oppressed classes and women across Edo (now Tokyo), Japan. At first glance, the nine pieces seem like a study in texture—the text, shapes and cartography are hidden, appearing as raised dots due to the monochrome palette and everyday nature of the fabric. This reveals itself to be a topographical and social map, visualising the power structure of society in the Edo era through its organisation of space and bodies. Commoners were segregated according to their work in square blocks with names like ‘blacksmith ward’ or ‘indigo dealers ward’, while affluent individuals were defined by their wealth and access to amenities and land.

This rumination continues in the final chapter of the exhibition—Lies Our Clothes Told Us—which depicts the floor plan of two Hanoks, or traditional Korean houses from the Joseon period (1392 – 1897) and the power structures they were a manifestation of. The architecture is a reflection of Confucian ideals; men and women did not share living spaces and were confined strictly to specific sections of the house, rarely intermingling. The artwork borrows its aesthetic from dancheong, a traditional colouring in Korean houses and architecture featuring patterns painted in bright green, blue, white, red and yellow. Two ambiguously gendered faces, almost mask-like in their appearance, look out from opposite sides of the artwork, alienated from each other. Sewn onto shiny red fabric in Blueprint 02, the text placed by the artist reads, “Properties of proportions in Korean homes were moderate. Lower classes used plaster walls set into rough wooden frames for their dwelling.” This draws attention to class differences in society and between the two homes in the exhibition, which belong to families in different socioeconomic strata. The small text size also makes the text less informational and more provocative—jumping out word by word, inviting history and lived experience into the abstract works.

Datta’s fabric art is ultimately invested in questions of biopolitics—how do institutions exercise power over the bodies and everyday lives of a population to make them more governable? This question transcends cultures and eras; as he notes, “The works produced exist as sites of tension, as a living archive which revisits and reinterprets historical chapters, but also firmly situates itself within narratives of the present.” By putting historical periods and regions into conversation through his textile art, Datta seems to suggest that previously oppressive systems and codes might be reborn in other forms; they can be overwritten through dialogue, experimentation and collaboration.

The exhibition ‘Volume IV: Truths, Half-Truths, Half-Lies, Lies’ will be on view from July 10 – August 20, 2025, at Experimenter, Colaba, Mumbai.