Reiko Mochinaga Brandon thinks that "textiles really speak eloquently of life."

They certainly speak well of her life, in which a childhood fascination with Japanese dolls evolved into an illustrious career as a textile artist. Her fiber creations have been exhibited everywhere from New York to Tokyo and London, including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, where she was curator of textiles for 20 years.

Brandon is the featured artist in "Commitment to Excellence," an exhibit that opens Tuesday at the Academy Art Center at Linekona. The weeklong exhibit, the 33rd annual event sponsored by the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce, also includes about 100 pieces selected from 550 submitted by local artists. Jurors James Kuroda of the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Mike Schnack of Cedar Street Galleries and Lisa Yoshihara, former director of the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, awarded prizes for best in show, newcomer and two- and three-dimensional works. The show also spotlights the works of an array of invited artists.

It isn’t cliché to say that Brandon’s career has followed a path as twisted as a thread woven into tapestry. She grew up in Japan and enjoyed playing with the traditional dolls her mother made. But as a child of postwar Japan, she wanted to "get rid of all my Japanese background," coming to the University of Hawaii as a Fulbright scholar in 1961. "Everything about Japan was bad, everything American was good," she recalled.

She planned to study American history but eventually was drawn to visual art, especially textiles. "I studied painting, ceramics, sculpture, but always I wanted to do something in textiles," she said. "Some professors told me that if I continued in textiles, ‘you really can’t make a living as an artist.’"

Married by then to James Brandon, a theater professor at UH, she didn’t have to make a living as an artist. So she persevered in her textile studies, earning a master’s degree. "In those days we didn’t even have the term fiber art," she said.

The field focused on intricate, complicated weaving, which Brandon learned to create on a loom. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, "I made huge, very colorful weavings, very Hawaiian," she said. "I think some offices still have my pieces."

She was working at the Academy of Arts and was teaching, but by the late 1980s she needed a break. The Brandons moved back to Japan for a year, living in Kyoto, a beautiful city spared the ravages of war and renowned for its nearly 2,000 temples and shrines.

"I realized this is my roots," Brandon said. "All those colorful images were gone. Everything is so serene, monochrome, very orderly yet very powerful. And I loved that."

That realization led her to the "plain weave," the simplest form of weaving, in which the horizontal "weft" threads are intertwined one by one with vertical "warp" threads. "I (thought) I can do something really that’s not just commercial or fashion design, but something that’s really art," she said.

Her career since has been devoted to plain weave, which she says emphasizes "the genuine color and texture, the true quality of the material." She has worked with conventional materials like cotton, silk or linen but also has woven substances like copper wire and paper to create abstract sculptures of Japanese deities.

Her "Floating Squares" is a series of linen hangings dyed in shades of indigo blue. "I eliminated some weft and eliminated also warp so that you can see the spaces in between," she said. "The hangings create a kind of delicate and almost weightless feeling. … I think you feel kind of — maybe it’s funny to say — soothing and nonviolent."

She now embraces the Japanese heritage she once rejected.

"Perhaps because of my Japanese background, I love simplicity and making something powerful out of simple things, if that’s possible," she said. "Maybe it’s my Japanese background or maybe my old age, but I’m becoming a purist."