efremidis

Oh Sufan’s crosses boundaries and clichés. He makes “Western paintings that are very Korean,” said the artist Kim Byung-Ki about him. Like the passing of time, day after day, his paintings are animated, continuously growing, appearing and disappearing. To this day, he remains “loyal to the instinct of childish play”. Shift- ing through these layers, Oh Sufan’s life and work were shaped by contradictions, dissonance and collision. Part of an ongoing lineage of critical abstraction, his contribution to contemporary painting is widely recognized in South Korea. The artist continues to resist stagnation: “I believe that contradictions coexist exactly because they are different. It can be dangerous to focus on a single idea.” His recent works are filled with a freedom of deviation, as they have broken away even from the abstract expressionist or calligraphic characteristics of the East. As if to mock the formal completeness of plastic arts, they are loyal to the instinct of childish play. - Chung Young-Mok, Seoul National University Oh Sufan (1946, KR) lives and works in Seoul. Solo exhibitions include Gana Art Center, Seoul; Gallery Maeght, Barcelona; Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya; Galerie Gana Beabourg, Paris; Thomas Segel Gallery, Boston and Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm. He has been included in major group exhibitions at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Kyungwoon Museum, Seoul; Haverford Museum, Philadelphia; Insa Arts Center, Seoul; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo and the Sao Paulo Biennale, Sao Paulo. He was awarded the Kim Sookeun Cultural Prize in 1996 and The New Face Artists Prize by the Korean Ministry of Culture in 1968.