Jong Oh

The Korean artist Jong Oh (b. 1981) creates minimal sculptures that respond to the given spatial situation. Oh describes this process as follows: “Responding to a site’s nuanced configuration, I build spatial structures by suspending Plexiglas and painted strings in the air. These elements connect or intersect with one another, depending on the viewers’ perspectives. Viewers walk in and around these paradoxical boundaries constituted by three-dimensionality and flatness, completion and destruction. The viewers’ experience becomes a meditation on perception’s whim.”

In these compositions, Oh makes use of a limited selection of materials: string, fishing line, Plexiglas, and wooden rods. The strings are sometimes painted on one side and are thus visible from one side only or almost entirely invisible. By constantly arranging these materials anew, Oh adds the suggestion of additional dimensions to the three-dimensional space. Lights and shadows extend these configurations by offering visual effects so that the highly fragile works resemble optical illusions of falling perspectives. In this dialogue of lines and planes, Oh is testing the limits of visibility. The works require an increased awareness of delicate oscillations and variations. Jong Oh is thus clearly making a case for an attention to small details, especially in the hectic bustle of everyday life. In a highly formal language that is almost completely free of narrative moments, Oh appeals above all to the viewers’ experience of the world. Alternating between sculpture and intervention, intangible image and installation, Oh considers each of his works as a carefully composed visual poem: “The works become subtle and restrained visual poems. Each only a few lines long, but addressing the universal.”

Jong Oh earned his BFA from Hongik University in Seoul and eventually his MFA from School of Visual Art in New York. In 2018, he had a solo exhibition in Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, and was in a two-person exhibition “Sculpting With Air” in deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, US; and “Every Day Is A Good Day” in SPIRAL, Tokyo, Japan. he is included in the group exhibition “Point Counter Point” at Art Sonje Center in Seoul. In 2016 he had a solo exhibition at the University of Connecticut Art Galleries. In 2014-5 he has had solo exhibitions at Krinzinger, Austria; Jochen Hempel, Leipzig; and MARSO, Mexico City. In 2014 he won a competition to create a large scale public installation along the Hudson River in Peekskill, New York. Jong Oh is represented by MARC STRAUS in New York and Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, Spain.