Oh’s Peace Please series, mobilizes a reductive, almost childlike visual language that at first recalls the immediacy of Art Brut and naïve iconography yet quickly reveals a far more charged ritual intentionality. Evoking both the cosmological symbolism of Hopi ceremonial imagery, the primitivist investigations of Natalia Goncharova, and Korean folk painting, these raw icons coalesce around mask-like up-right and frontal bust images. The distorted features of these totemic heads, seem caught in a field of visual interference, as though disrupted by static, and are dominated by abstract red ovals roughly worked with natural dye, that appears to make them vibrate with restless intensity. Yet, these folk totems do not merely depict spirits; they channel them, their contours trembling, fragmenting, and reconstituting as if transmitting the unseen. The abrasive materiality of oil stick and pastel amplifies this otherworldly sense of vibration; energy seems to radiate outward from the cranial forms, circulating between the head as locus of consciousness and the surrounding reddish world-space. Thought, spirit, and matter are made to collapse into a single pulsating field. The artist’s recurring motifs in the series Peace Please, as well as in Hidden Memories draw upon jangseung, the carved totemic posts traditionally placed at Korean village thresholds as apotropaic guardians. But, in this context, they become vertical presences that anchor the compositions within a cosmic system of protection and liminality.

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Simultaneously, Oh’s sustained and technically sophisticated engagement with Hanji, positions him, as a master paper artist deeply rooted in Korean material and pictorial tradition. Trained in the painting style of Minhwa (whose symbolic repertoire encompasses tigers, mountains, temples, pojagi textiles, and scholarly interiors) his practice both inherits and transforms this vernacular idiom. Earlier series emphasized the twisting and extrusion of the paper surface, with protruding fibres delicately tinted at their extremities in restrained tonalities of grey, deep blue, and sanguine. In his more recent works the gesture becomes incisive rather than accumulative, as he cuts into the paper with meticulous precision, generating fields of minute chrysanthemum-like forms whose subtle relief barely emerges from the flat surface. Oh’s engagement with Korean hand-made Hanji reaches a particularly refined articulation in the Flower King series. Here the surface of Hanji paper becomes a field of minute incisions and subtle reliefs, generating delicate proliferations of petal-like formations whose rhythmic dispersion recalls a biomorphic mode of non-objective painting. Rather than presenting the peony as a descriptive botanical motif, Oh allows the flower to emerge through the very structure of the surface, as though the paper itself were slowly flowering into form. Interpreted through a shamanic notion in which natural phenomena are understood to contain latent spiritual energies, the peony assumes a symbolic charge associated with fire; an element traditionally linked to purification, transformation, and cyclical renewal.

 

Ultimately, Hidden Memories – Romantic Sublime functions as a definitive coda to the current pictorial zeitgeist defining Chelsea’s contemporary circuit. While the surrounding galleries largely oscillate within a renewed fascination for a vivid objective formalism, Oh’s intervention avoids the pitfalls of mere stylistic revivalism. Instead, he orchestrates a radical departure from the traditional canvas, propelling the animated energy of contemporary painting into a more complex, tactile dimension through his masterful manipulation of Hanji. By treating this traditional medium as a site of sculptural incision and luminous depth, Oh transcends the static nature of pigment, allowing the chromatic intensity of a romantic sublime to breathe within a three-dimensional field of hidden memories.