Oxford Town Hall sits at the center of one of the most recognizable cities in the world, its Victorian Gothic facade facing St Aldate's Street with the particular confidence of a building that has presided over the life of the city for well over a century. It was here, across three halls and three days in February 2018, that the fifth Oxford International Art Fair gathered artists and galleries from 26 countries for the only international art fair the city has ever hosted. Among the exhibitors, Cooley was the sole artist selected from Japan.

Seven works made the journey. The Fairy Ring was among them, its gold ground and sunflower-filled canvas carrying the warmth of a body of work that had been built in an Osaka studio and shown across the Kansai region before finding its way to an English city whose relationship to art runs through centuries of accumulated institutional weight. The works arrived in Oxford without Cooley, who was exhibiting elsewhere at the time, the paintings representing the practice in a context he would not be present to navigate or explain. They occupied their allocated space in the Town Hall and did what the work has always done in the absence of commentary: stood on its own terms and asked to be looked at.

That the work should appear in this particular setting, among artists from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and beyond, was a reminder of something that the practice's geography had always quietly proposed: that work built from two cultures simultaneously belongs to neither exclusively, and travels accordingly. The gilded surfaces and symbolic figures that had their roots in Japanese decorative tradition and Western surrealism alike required no single cultural frame to communicate. An audience in Oxford encountered them the way any audience encounters work that does not announce its own origins: through the immediate fact of the image itself, before context arrives to tell them what to think.

The fair has since ceased. What it represented at its fifth edition in 2018 was a genuinely international gathering in a city accustomed to receiving the world, and within it, a body of work that had crossed more distance, culturally and geographically, than almost anything else in the room.