Kei Ota’s background as a former ballet dancer, immigrant, and returnee informs her practice, all of which have left her with a hyperawareness of her body and its surroundings. Her primary painting practice explores tensions between figuration and abstraction, tensions that parallel oppositional embodiments of feeling foreign and native, as well as dream and reality, by drawing images from her memories using Surrealist methods of automatism. Meanwhile, her physical experience as a dancer informs her desire to shape painting beyond its two-dimensional form as a body in space or as a dancer. Through painting, video, and installation, she aims to immerse viewers in the theatrical nature of memory that exists in the gray borders between cultures and languages.