Drawing on fieldwork with Russian-speaking migrants in Japan, this study proposes a holistic, migrant-agency-centered perspective on migration, art, and homemaking as processes that are quotidian, embodied, sensory, and relational. The paper incorporates scholarly approaches to indigenous art regarding the embodied nature of art and the inseparability of art from other aspects of social life. The study also draws on the relational, political, and boundary-crossing dimensions of art as conceived in anthropological discourse. Six ethnographic cases are discussed within the migration–art–home triad, with the first set focusing on embodiment and sensory experiences, and the second on relationality and boundary-crossing in artistic homemaking. The methodological benefit of not separating art, as an isolated activity, from the rest of the creative potential of people's everyday lives, is emphasized. The approach foregrounds the everydayness of artistic practices and their embeddedness in all spheres of migrants’ lives. It also shows how art becomes home through bodily and relational materialities, and how migrants use artistic homemaking to elicit embodied, sensory belonging and integration into both the host society and the wider world.
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