City Gallery Wellington resource card ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Seung Yul Oh: MOAMOA, A Decade SEUNG YUL OH [b. 1981 Korea, New Zealand] The Ability to Blow Themselves Up 2004-2013 digital video, sound, 10:31 minutes (screen capture) City Gallery Wellington’s education service is supported by the Ministry of Education’s LEOTC fund. City Gallery Wellington resource card ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Seung Yul Oh: MOAMOA, A Decade About the artist Key terms Seung Yul Oh (born Seoul, Korea 1981) moved to New Zealand in 1997, where he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2003) followed by a Master of Fine Arts (2005), both at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Raised and educated in New Zealand and South Korea, Oh produces playful works full of references to both East Asian pop culture and to Western modern art. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies and has exhibited widely in New Zealand and abroad including recent solo shows Bogle Bogle at The Dowse Art Museum, 2010, SEESAW at ONE and J. Gallery, Seoul, 2013 and Seung Yul Oh: Joyride at TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, 2013. Expansion – the action of becoming larger, more extensive or spread out. Multiple – more than one of the same object. Scale – the relative size of things. Interactive Art – a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Artist statement About the work Seung Yul Oh is an artist who is interested in the possibilities of play. His work is predominantly sculptural although he also makes paintings and videos. Oh is well known for his improvisational approach to materials – in the past expanded foam, popcorn and balloons have featured in his practice, more recently his work has taken the form of hard fibreglass and resin sculptures or soft inflatable installations. 1 Oh’s sculptures have been playfully described as ‘space invaders’ . He creates forms which stack up, expand out or multiply into the gallery space, transforming rooms and creating experiences for the viewer to navigate. Within this exhibition, MOAMOA (Korean for ‘gather gather’ or ‘gather together’), we find spaces for collective play or action: Periphery (2013) is a ‘forest’ of yellow inflatables which we can push through or get lost within, experiencing a sculpture from the inside out; Sphere Square (2013) is a gigantic room-sized bean bag which can be clambered onto and explored like a landscape; and Oddooki (2010) is a collection of five egg shaped birds, toys from a childhood memory which have been scaled up and transformed into large sculptures that rock and chime. In Seung Yul Oh’s work the size of familiar objects is often exaggerated turning the ordinary into the magical. References to food and the body have often played a part in Oh’s practice – in one early exhibition he battered and deep fried his own paintings. Recent works on show here transform classic Korean dishes into gravity defying resin sculptures. Noodles rise uncannily from their bowls transforming familiar dishes into something unfamiliar and strange. “I am interested in different ways of introducing, prompting or limiting relationships between the viewers’ body and an object, shape or mass. I want to initiate an exchange of feelings, to have the viewer achieve a sense of empathy with the work, with each other, and with the world they move through.” Pre/post-visit activities • Altered Scale Narrative English Read a story or watch a film in which the main character(s) finds themselves shrunk or grown to a different size. How do they experience the world differently when they find themselves too big or small for their surroundings? Write a story in which you find yourself shrunk down to a tiny size. Imagine how ordinary objects might be transformed at this scale, what unexpected things might you notice from this new point of view? Pick one room in your house and describe how you would get from one side to the other, describing some of the unexpected difficulties and pleasures you might encounter. • Moamoa picnic Social science Inspired by Seung Yul Oh’s incredible resin noodle sculptures, think about food that reminds you of the place that your family is from. Have a class discussion about your favourite dishes. Gather together for a class picnic to share some traditional food. • Sure to Rise Sculpture Project Visual Art, Science Find out about the reaction that causes the dough to expand by performing this simple experiment using yeast and a balloon: http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/activity-yeast.html Mix up a batch of bread dough and sculpt simple forms inspired by works in Seung Yul Oh’s exhibition. Put your sculptures in a warm place, photograph at five minute intervals to document the changes as the dough expands and make a flipbook using this sequence of images. Bake your sculptures and brainstorm some ways to create an exhibition of your work. • Compare and contrast Art History Choose one of the artists from the related artists list and find out more about their work. What does their practice have in common with that of Seung Yul Oh? How does the work differ? MOAMOA charts Oh’s belief in the transformative power of art: its ability to turn the everyday into the magical, the passive experience into active encounter, the individual into the collective and the mundane into the profound. Related artists/artworks David Cross Based in Wellington for the past decade, David Cross is an artist who uses performance, installation, video and photography in his work. He is well known for creating large scale inflatable environments which draw audiences into unexpected situations. You may remember his giant inflatable work which took over a room at City Gallery as part of The Obstinate Object exhibition in 2012. Martin Creed Work no. 200 Martin Creed’s Work no 200 involved containing exactly half the air in a room inside white balloons. Viewers were invited to immerse themselves in the balloon-filled room to experience claustrophobia and childlike lightness in equal measure. Anish Kapoor Ark Nova Ark Nova is a giant inflatable concert hall by British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor and architect Arata Isozaki. It was created to host free concerts in areas of Japan devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The huge structure is made from a translucent purple membrane that can fully inflate in two hours. The simple, curved shape of the work and use of monochrome colour is characteristic of Kapoor’s sculptural practice 1 Further information Books: Seung Yul Oh: MOAMOA, City Gallery Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2014 Website links: http://www.ohseungyul.com/ http://www.thearts.co.nz/artist_page.php&aid=116&type=biohttp://www.t hearts.co.nz/artist_page.php&aid=116&type=bio http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/seung-yul-oh-huggong/ retrieved May 2014
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