SANG-TAEK OH

CLOSETS

NOV.14 - DEC.20, 2013

Opening Reception_November. 14 (Thu) 6pm




The solo show of photographer Sang-taek Oh, who has represented contemporary people’s dormant desire and self through the subject matter of clothes hung in an imaginary closet, is being held from November 14 through December 20, 2013. After a successful completion of his one-man show (Un)Necessities at Taksu Gallery in Singapore last July, Oh present his 34 new pieces produced in collaboration with garment designers and brands at home and abroad for this Seoul exhibition. 
 
Born in Seoul in 1970, Sang-taek Oh currently works as a professor of photography at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. After graduation from the Seoul Institute of the Arts, he went to the United States and obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has so far held 13 domestic and overseas solo shows and joined numerous group exhibitions. He also joined artist-in-residence programs at the Seoul Museum of ArtNanji Art Studio, and National Art Studio Goyang. His pieces are housed in the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea Art Bank, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, the Seoul National University Art Museum, OCBC Bank in Singapore, and others. 
 
During the exhibition a fashion show by Publicka Atelier, a designer garment brand best-known for its classic designs and modern details,was held at 5:00 pm on November 27 (Wed.), 2013. A lecture by Li Ken-shu, a fashionista and monthly art magazine Wolgan Misool chief editor, was also arranged. At the lecture titled My Beautiful Jacket, Lee spoke about his collection of jackets and fashion-related stories.
 
 
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Artist Statement 
 
Things ineffable that I want to say.
Tings telltale that I want to conceal.
Things I want to speak about but I should not.
That is probably because people draw pictures.
 
Chaekgado is the painting of books and scholar’s paraphernalia. As one of the Joseon painting modes, Chaekgado seemed to be a means for Joseon scholars to show off their identity. It is obvious that Joseon scholars wanted to show off their knowledge and living through paintings, a means more refined than books for ostentation. Of course, the meaning and value of painting per se had to be evaluated differently, but its use was for somewhat refined ostentation. This use of art has been often found in art history, not only chaekgado, but also other types of artworks across the ages and in all countries of the world. 
 
Despite this, chaekgado was widely relished by all walks of life, including royal family and ordinary mortals, as seen in royal paintings and folk paintings. Books were truly of great symbolic significance in Joseon society. If so, what can symbolize the characteristics of our times? I have chosen clothes, especially designer garments. Clothes are obviously a living necessity but can be considered a symbol of social power. I suggest that clothes today are analogous to chaekgado in the past. This is representing and reinterpreting clothesin the form of chaekgado, or so-called “expanded perspective”. It can be said that the typical form of Joseonchaekgado is “expanded perspective”. 
 
 
“Expanded perspective” is literally the expanded application and interpretation of perspective, one of the significant principles in Western art. It is a way of interpreting and depicting an object seen from multiple angles in one scene. Joseonchaekgado is particularly marked by this method, but can be seen as one of the painting styles addressed in other Joseon paintings and Western paintings as well. 
 
 
Another primary methodology of my work is also a visual conveyance of meaning through a sense of volume. I have met Choi Hong-man, a giant Korean kickboxer and former ssirem wrestler. At the time, I realized the meaning of the word ‘awkward’ for the first time. If an object is tremendously large or small beyond the degree we expect, it would be perceived as a foreign or imaginary being outside of reality. However, Hong was a being that provided me with the sense of reality that he is about 10% larger than a normal person and massive as a whole. This new experience or awkwardness is not an unreal, imaginary sense of volume, it is a sense of volume that is foreign and disparate from the volume we feel through experience. This experience is also an incident that convinced me of the feeling of awkwardness, logically. I thought the true nature of designer goods was similar to this: they cannot be owned with ease but we can possess them all if we try. This is the departure point of my work.
 
I photographed the closet. Clothes are an item I pay careful attention to, like, and want to have. This is a primary element through which someone perceives my existence. Clothes are obviously an immediate, universal means of perception. Today, when means of visual perception is more evolved than any other times, more people seem to concentrate on garments as means of self-expression. In this context I begin painting clothes as a means of immediate ostentation in contemporary society as one who has a lowbrow taste for clothes or superficial adornment. This may be my reasoning’s rebuke to my instinctive ego; a monolog deriving from restraint of vaunting; or a healing of the stress inflicted on instinct by my reason.
 
“I make an imaginary closet. I document real clothes and overlap them with the closet. However, the closet is not real, and the clothes are also awkward and unwearable.”