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| Artist Oh Se-yeol / Courtesy of Hakgojae Gallery |
By Park Han-sol
On a number of canvases, rows of carefree scribbles and numerical digits occupy the entire space, sometimes interrupted by the presence of everyday objects ― buttons, clamshells and small pieces of plastic. Other paintings, instead of being filled with a similar swarm of lines are rather bare, with a child figure who is missing either an arm, leg, or mouth, standing alone.
Such spontaneous, simple characters describe the painter Oh Se-yeol's work presented at the new exhibition "Island of Metaphors" at Hakgojae Gallery in Samcheong-dong, Seoul.
Oh was born in 1945 in Seoul when the country regained independence from colonial rule under Japan. But at the age of five, the Korean War (1950-1953) broke out, forcing him to watch the death of his older sister and spend his childhood amid ruins and ashes. As he grew older, he witnessed the country's rapid industrialization and materialism that exposed human selfishness and people's violent tendencies.
But instead of resorting to sharp criticism against such trends, or a realistic representation of pain, the 76-year-old artist brings out the childlike innocence within him as his own way of tending to past wounds and giving words of comfort to others.
His semi-abstract paintings are inspired by sentiment and imagination as seen through the eyes of a child. To children, doodling doesn't require serious thought and is instead dictated by what they feel at that precise moment. They do not care about what constitutes a good or bad painting, and any lines drawn, even numerical digits, can easily turn into playful patterns.
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| Oh Se-yeol's "Untitled" (2021) / Courtesy of Hakgojae Gallery |
Oh's childlike spirit is reflected in his carefree use of numbers and everyday objects.
"Numbers remind us of when we learned something for the first time. From the time when we grabbed a stubby pencil and started writing down digits, we are forever accompanied by them," he said at the gallery.
From teaspoons, gravel, bottle caps and mini plastic knives, the objects, tiny and useless, scattered on his canvas come from his own pockets as well as streets.
"I look at the ground a lot when I'm walking and I sometimes find a small pebble by my foot or tiny pieces of garbage with an interesting shape. I pick them up and assign special roles to these meaningless scraps," he explained. "I find joy in coming across something unexpected and the objects find joy in becoming a whole new being."
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| Oh Se-yeol's "Untitled" (2019) / Courtesy of Hakgojae Gallery |
But underlying his playful, intuitive style is his exploration of past wounds. His paintings are born from the process where he makes countless strokes after strokes until they form thick, solid-colored coats of paints that become the background. Then, he takes a sharp tool like a nail or a razor blade to scrape the surface and draw lines or numbers.
To Oh, the canvas is his own body and the activity of chiseling it over and over again inevitably reveals his inner wounds. "It can be described as a process of hurting my own body as I think of the suffering, sorrow and the memory associated with these feelings experienced since childhood."
Through his metaphorical depiction and understanding of pain, he gives words of comfort to a present-day audience. The message can be most strongly felt in his drawings of "incomplete," solitary child figures, who miss an arm, foot, leg or mouth.
"After the war, there were many children who either lived on the fringes of society or were left by their parents to lead a directionless, wandering life. Dark thoughts consume them. I wanted to indirectly portray the feeling of loneliness through the shapes inspired by these children."
The exhibit will run until May 5.
