Oh so very playful
Andrew Clifford

VISUAL ARTS: Doodling is just part of the process Seung Yul Oh uses to make insignificant things great. Andrew Clifford reports

What: CHEW CHEW Tongue, by Seung Yul Oh

Where and when: Starkwhite, 510 K Rd, to Feb 28

When Korean-born artist Seung Yul Oh moved to Auckland nearly ten years ago, he anticipated a snowy, alpine leisure land. "The reason that I was really excited about New Zealand was snowboarding but in Auckland there is no snow," he says with a laugh. "I was expecting that I would be snowboarding everyday and I've only been twice."

Fortunately Oh also had the intention of studying art, a recreational pursuit he says anyone can partake in.

"Anything can be entertainment and I think that making art is just another possibility of being a human being," he says. "The making of it is more fun than anything else."

There is a DIY roughness to Oh's work. His animal-like constructions are made from wood, concrete, or found objects, and are reminiscent of folk-art, an association he approves of.

"I'm really interested in that. I really enjoy anyone who is making things. Even when we talk to somebody or we're thinking something and you doodle, or in your pocket you're rolling paper or a little dust - all that kind of activity. I think that's really interesting, how it's not just artists making art. Those very insignificant things are great, I think."

Oh's choice of materials is similarly playful. By using materials like extruding foam, balloons and popcorn, Oh is invoking a more fundamental experience of creativity, which most people can trace to their childhood.

In the video work The Ability To Blow Themselves Up, exhibited last year at the New Gallery, Oh showed his friends inflating balloons until they burst.

"I want to capture that very fundamental possibility of their human condition that we don't even notice," he says of the genuinely shocked reactions he elicits from each participant.

Oh's materials also add a random factor and he likes to let his creations guide themselves, suggesting what to do next and surprising him with the results.

"It's exciting to see what's going to come next. It's creating something that doesn't exist in this world."

The paintings that accompany Oh's large installational playground are a good example of his process, shifting between abstract, blobby shapes and strange sketchy creatures.

"I do a lot of doodling, every morning and every day, and new forms and new sculptures and anything comes out of them. I find painting is very musical; you just bring these elements and colours and forms and it comes out and harmonises in a new work."

Making the most noise in the Starkwhite exhibition CHEW CHEW Tongue is a large wooden box emanating deep electronic notes. Oh says it was originally meant to be a bird but, by finishing sculptures sooner than planned, he ended up with more interesting results.

"You have an idea and you're making things to that stage, but in the process you're finding different qualities from the certain different stages, and that has more potential to be something.

"Every single object is your baby and you work until it is alive to you and it speaks to you."

Oh's playful, process-oriented approach to making art has already proven popular. Last year he was included in Artspace's annual New Artist exhibition, in 2004 he won the Waikato National Art Award and, in 2003, the Goldwater Art Award. He has his first solo dealer show with at Starkwhite and is about to have work exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Oh's world is not entirely inhabited by cute woodland creatures and children's parties a la Beatrix Potter or A.A. Milne. Rather, this is the scatological boys' land of stinky entrails, where holes are for putting fingers in, toys are for pulling apart, bugs are for poking and goopy forms aren't so much extruded as excreted.

Oh talks of the tendency to throw things, turn them inside-out, splash and spit from high buildings. "I heard that 95 percent of boys spit when they go up to a certain height. That's a kind of weird thing, eh?

 

ENDS