Oh Hee Won: Parallel Grounds

For painters, paying attention to the fundamental structure which forms paintings is a matter of course. Especially, It is more apparent when you investigate the paintings whose criteria is defined by historical factors rather than dealing with common pictures understood as visual symbols or patterns for decoration. What are the aspects maintaining the unique realm—paintings? In order to respond to this question, prior to painters, several general conditions deciding the presence of paintings are considered as subjects of the research; they involve a wide range of elements from art regime as a social structure to canvas as a corporeal and geometric object or paints as an industrial material. What Heewon Oh has explored for last recent years, fundamentally corresponds with it. She has repeated studying her surroundings and reconstructing them. This approach eventually gained the initial completed mode in her first solo exhibition, <White Void>, in 2014.

The exhibition consisted of two separate types of works. One was a series titled <Blind Site> depicting empty exhibition spaces without displayed art pieces, and the other was <Moving Track [No.02]> visualising shifts of distribution status of exhibitions spaces in the whole Gyeongbokgung Palace area form 1999 to 2013. Although they were her early works, they rather explicitly demonstrated Heewon Oh’s methodology for creation. In the case of <Blind Site>, it did not describe the scenery of the exhibition building’s vacant interior when all art works were taken down. The work was produced when the artist eliminated the images of the artworks in the exhibition space, based on her recollections of the tactile sensation and photographic archives after experiencing the space when all the art works were displayed. In consideration of the original purpose of the exhibition space normally spotlighting the presented works, it was obvious that most spectators had hardly encountered this scene before. As modern white cube spaces conceptually aim at a transparent space isolated from its outer world, its white walls and grey floor constituting the exhibition expanse are controlled to be seen as non-material, more precisely, they are invisible devices deliberately keeping the audience’s gaze from remaining on themselves. In this context, what Oh reconstructs by precisely applying thick paints on her canvas is a self-denying or self-protecting space. Consequently, the space is discovered by the artist as a rare invisible circumstance where paintings, the peculiar subject, are able to settle down in.

At that time, Heewon Oh recorded her discoveries and expanded them as an ecologist did. Thus, she not only documented shapes of each exhibition site by treating it as a paintings’ habitat and researched the districts where the colonies of the exhibition spaces were densely located and the pattern of their distribution, but also traced their alteration according to the lapse of time. Even though her attitude seemed to be indifferent and objective, her perspective conveyed a slight sense of sorrow as if she were a person recording endangered species. Considering this solo exhibition, <Parallel Grounds> where she reveals her body of works after almost four years, the sense can be expressed as a grief of a person facing winter—it is closer to winter than summer. When trees hold only their bare branches after leaves fall down, a certain clear field of vision suddenly appears.

Nevertheless, the artist does not take advantage of this moment to disclose a certain truth behind the tangible or mere hollowness. Oh only concentrates on the changes of the landscape caused when water vapour is condensed after a haze and she attempts to actively react to them. What kind of landscape is it? Most of all, it is a landscape of paintings. You could reflect upon the long and endless dusk of this medium—painting, while you are appreciating works in the art space.

This landscape, however, cannot be compressed into one piece of a landscape painting or a historical picture. Oh chooses the option of fumbling about finding a path in the landscape instead of constructing the outside’s viewpoint allowing her to observe the dim scenery. The road is not an exit of the pictorial landscape, yet it is towards the inside of the landscape. Multi-dimensional sceneries in the exhibition ultimately signify rearranged artist’s subjective trajectories. They illustrate not only the history of paintings but also the history of an individual painter, as they unfold temporal progress which can not be caught within a surface or one sight onto the spatial background. Oh takes a direction different from historically well-established genres such as a portrait of artists. In Her practice, the artist’s presence does not manifest itself through intense strokes or specified figures. Oh’s paintings do not obey the conventional logic in which an artwork often stands out from its space by treating the surroundings as its invisible background. Expanded into a transparent or semi-transparent vexillum, the paintings visualize the space supporting them and leave their traces on it; they achieve composing a certain landscape which can not be reverted to an individual piece. The existence of the painter is omnipresent in the series of her working precess, in materials she employs or discards, and in time and places in which the scene is created, as though she wanted to gradually permeate into the paintings’ surroundings by playing a role of their foundation or their ground where they can grow and inhabit in.

The result is inorganic and cold rather than organic and warm. From any angles, it is similar to pre-biological world before sunlight glints, lightning strikes, water circulates and rocks crystallize, instead of the universe throbbing with creatures. In this regard, the paintings pursue inhuman, non-mechanical, and non-organic nature where water is solidified into rocks and rocks are melted into water. It is not impossible to find references for this fictive place. For example, it is reasonable to say that experiencing non-pictorial media such as photography, computers, printed matter destroys paintings’s original time and space and seeks for new order. In fact, Heewon Oh has been focused on a series of works experimenting on modelling diverse media’s sensibility instead of producing paintings for the past several years. Except the new piece <Blind Site> visualizing the exhibition space, most of works in the show are manifested through the employment of pigments rather than oil paints. Nonetheless, the reason why the exhibition, <Parallel Grounds> evidently refers to the painting genre is that examining non-pictorial features is carried out in the territory of paintings. In the exhibition, Oh consistently concentrates on comprehending paintings as painted objects placed in the white exhibition space.

From this viewpoint, Oh’s paintings are a physical and optical substance, since they exist either to offer viewers what they can look at and to be looked at. Strictly speaking, they are objective targets, yet they do not independently exist separate from their circumstance. They are optimized for the restricted environment which normally is the white cube exhibition space. They demand their own light and space and they only emerge as autonomous subjects in this limited space. Therefore the paintings introspecting their own existential nature pay attention to the space which is their basis and modify themselves into semi-transparent shapes integrating with the space. Similar to natural sceneries, they appear as an independent phenomenon that does not require any history, system or even the heroic agency which stands for the painter, though they are still vulnerable and artificial like an ecosystem constructed in a glass greenhouse.

As a director of the landscape or a gardener of a mineral material’s garden, the artist is well aware of the fact. The works consisting of an exhibition clearly ought to be created and preserved outside of the exhibition space as they are not thin ice growing and dissolving in the space. In addition, Heewon Oh tries to form a notion of an artist as a physical existence who becomes a part of a certain autonomous movement through interaction with its environment, rather than a main agent independent on its surroundings. This presence can establish its rules, but it cannot negate physical laws(such as the effect of gravity) or biological laws(such as physiological structures of eyes and hands or chronic fatigue). She reveals that an artist and an artwork are situated in layered relational nets. Moreover, she raises the status of the nets up to the nature of paintings or the beginning and end of self-exploring paintings. This bizarre naturalism separates paintings from the chaotic history of the human world. In terms of physical sides, what ensures the separation are only the white walls of the exhibition space and a layer of paints. Like a simmering mirage, the landscape will disappear when the exhibition is closed and it will be stored in an opaque box by the time it awakes again in a white and bright exhibition space.

Wonhwa Yoon / Researcher of Visual Culture. Her previous books include <On the thousand and second night: Visual Arts of Seoul in the 2010s> and <Could a document re/produce time?> and her translated books include <The optical media> and <The discourse network 1800/1900>.