Seung Yul Oh

INFO

Name	Seung Yul Oh (he/him)
Born	1981
Country of Birth	South Korea
Place of Residence	Seoul, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Korean
Dealer Gallery	Starkwhite, ONE AND J. Gallery
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Seung Yul Oh is a multidisciplinary artist known for his large-scale installations and minimal yet playful work. His iconic public sculptures can be seen throughout Aotearoa. In 2014, just ten years after graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts, a major retrospective exhibition of Oh’s work, MOAMOA, was held at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington.

Oh was born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea, moving to Aotearoa on his own as a 15-year-old international student. The reality of suburban Auckland differed to the untouched wilderness he had imagined but he enjoyed getting lost in a totally new place. A feeling of freedom that comes with ‘getting lost’ and similarly with play, underpins the sense of intuition informing his practice. Interactivity, scale and a consideration of site often feature in his work, as do animals, natural or abstract forms, and everyday objects. This is expressed eloquently in an interview with Sunjung Kim in Seung Yul Oh: MOAMOA: “As a poet uses words, I use forms for their qualities of sound and rhythm, and for their potential to offer a physical experience.”

His particular interest in the highly charged moment of encounter between viewer and artwork was first explored during art school in the ongoing video work The Ability To Blow Themselves Up (2004–ongoing) in which participants are filmed blowing up balloons until they burst. The work highlights themes which appear throughout his practice — a repetitious act with a known outcome nevertheless full of tension and surprise, as well as being a playful, frivolous action. Again, from Seung Yul Oh: MOAMOA: “It’s all about building the anticipation, about waiting for the profound or the inevitable to happen. This seems to be the condition of all art, and of life itself.”

Oddooki (2008), a childhood toy that Oh recreated on a grand scale, was originally commissioned as a site-specific installation for the windswept sculpture terrace at Te Papa. Five cartoon-like chicken/egg forms with high-gloss surfaces stood a metre high, and chime and re-right themselves when pushed.

His inflatable series of sculptures are huge, soft-edged structures. Huggong fills each exhibition space differently; a transparent, air-filled PVC sphere is squished between hand railings in a stairwell (ONE AND J. Gallery, 2013); huge bright yellow and orange balloon-like orbs stretch floor to ceiling or around structural beams (Starkwhite Gallery, 2012). To experience Periphery (2013), viewers must navigate a gallery space filled with larger-than-human sized yellow and white inflated oblong objects. Such simple yet monumental gestures characterise Oh’s work.

The public sculpture OnDo (2015–2021), which featured a tower of noodles emerging from the footpath on Dominion Road, was a humorous nod to the abundance of local Asian eateries in the area.

Oh was the winner of the National Contemporary Art Award in 2005, and recipient of the Arts Foundation’s 2010 Harriet Friedlander Residency. His works are in the permanent collections of major public institutions including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. He currently splits his time living between Korea and Aotearoa, together with his family.