Seung Yul Oh
Grass on Grass
2006
polyurethane resin with pigment
Recently young Korean-New Zealand artist Seung Yul Oh likened his work to a ‘crazy garden with lots of different plants in it’.* He was referring to the lack of a signature style which has, ironically, become his hallmark. His solo exhibition last year at Starkwhite, Chew Chew Tongue, contained such a diversity of objects in such a wide variety of media that it looked at first glance like a group show. With Grass on Grass, Oh has expanded his catalogue again, introducing a cartoonish aesthetic into his rendering of clumps of tussock, a new departure from the curvy, sausage-like, vaguely alimentary forms which surfaced in his solo show.
Grass on Grass sprouts on a lightly-wooded hillside. Trying to fit in yet cheerfully standing right out of place, it defies outdoor sculpture’s usual exhortation towards harmonious co-existence with its environment. Botany this ain’t. Here nature is strained through the filter of contemporary popular culture. The work’s two-tone shading and multiple repetitions borrow from the ‘primitive’ background art of early isometric platformer video games. This is a work with a self-consciousness of its own role as visual spectacle, announcing itself clearly as a cultural entertainer in the natural world.
Oh is currently developing his work in a fertile self-charted territory somewhere between Pop and process art. The collision of these two unlikely revivalist bedfellows - the one concerned with the slick surfaces of contemporary urban life, the other in which the process of making the work becomes its own rather earnest subject - makes for a great deal of (intentional) humour in his practice. Admitting of the rich creative possibilities of chance and accident in making works of art, Oh is a frequent doodler, who has said that he’s interested in ‘very insignificant things’.* Grass on Grass looks more than a little like a doodle rendered in three dimensions. With this, as with other recent works, Oh’s achievement is to combine a cheekily improvisational aesthetic with a distinct and purposeful clarity concerning the contingent role of contemporary site-specific sculpture.
Lara Strongman
*Artist’s statement Brick Bay 2006
