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The energetic and exuberant playfulness of emerging artist Seung Yul Oh has been hard to ignore in recent years. Fresh out of art school, he has quickly become a precocious, energetic and unpredictable presence. His quirky solo projects, collaborations and contributions to group shows have appeared in all manner of alternative spaces around Auckland, from artist-run galleries to car-parks to page-works in glossy magazines.
Oh is a self-confessed obsessive doodler and has an improvisational ethic permeating all aspects of his practice, so it was little surprise to find in Artspace’s 2005 new artists survey, Compelled, which showcased a group of emerging artists for whom making is a compulsion. Oh’s work emphatically occupied the main room, responding to the gallery’s hard-edged white cube with large, goopy dollops of candy-coloured polyurethane foam and plaster. For his master’s gradate exhibition at the end of 2005, the large rocking plywood crescent named ‘Twiddle Twigs’ was an even more lurid presence, with its bright orange veneer and sleek retro-minimalist geometry upstaging the coy shonkiness of most student work.
‘Twiddle Twigs’ made a return appearance in CHEW CHEW Tongue, Oh’s first solo dealer show. Placed in the window of upmarket gallery StarkWhite, this could easily be mistaken for corporate plaza art, but a photo in the local paper of Oh riding the sculpture like a see-saw quickly deflates any airs of ostentation.
It is this playfulness that is at the core of Oh’s prolific practice. The incessant doodling evident in his paintings may recall the anthropomorphic mind games of the surrealists and abstract expressionists, but it is the creative act itself that interest’s Oh, not some manifestation of the inner psyche. For Oh, every