Much of what we are seeing among the new generations of artists in Europe and the United States can be ascribed to a more or less recent aesthetic theory which adheres to the notion that a work of art cannot be understood without considering the context in which it is created. In a way, that notion is related to John Dewey's educational philosophy of pragmatism, the belief that students should interact with their surroundings in order to adapt and learn. In his Art as Experience, Dewey describes form in art as “the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene and situation to its own integral fulfilment.” His contemporaries and his epigones interpreted that declaration to mean that the general harmonious structure of a work of art derives from the relation of forms, which is central to the composition. And there is where the aesthetic experience originates. But, in that "operation of forces” and in that “relation of forms”, where are the surroundings and where is the context?
In art, as in life, everything depends on the experience, the experience of reality. But what happens when the operation of forces and the relation of forms are materialized in the same experience? That, and the ability of art to question the limits of perception and slow down our relationship with our surroundings, is the subject of the work of Jong Oh.
Oh, explains that “Responding to a site’s nuanced configuration, I build spatial structures by suspending Plexiglas and painted strings in the air. These elements connect or intersect with one another, depending on the viewers’ perspectives. Viewers walk in and around these paradoxical boundaries constituted by three-dimensionality and flatness, completion and destruction. The viewers’ experience becomes a meditation on perception’s whim.” In other words, Jong Oh does not work in the studio. Oh does not have a studio. Oh focuses on the properties and idiosyncrasies of the space/site where he is going to make his presentation in order to undertake his project. From there, and with the economy of materials he uses —Plexiglas, strings, graphite, fishing lines, chains of jewels, light metal or wooden bars, metal pendulums or weights, and the light — Oh creates a series of spatial constructions which, depending on the time we spend experiencing the work, may intensify our perception, both regarding the physicality and materiality of the work itself and in relation to the limits of our own physicality.
The work, in general, suggests basic geometric forms which, in some cases, accentuate the characteristics of the architectural space, or contrast with them, and, in other cases, emphasise elements to which we do not normally pay attention to, such as a column, a corner, etc. In this way, Oh's work sometimes reminds us of Fred Sandback, the sculptor of space, in his initial literality. Neither of them represents because they work directly in the third dimension, without translating the three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional representation. Therefore, it is not "drawing in space" but rather "sketching" in space, as Julian Rose refers to it. In both, also, illusionism plays a role which is inevitably related to the fact that three-dimensional space is only “real” as a result of the perceptive experience. And we perceive the space - especially the depth - by interpreting certain clues or signals in a process which, in the end, is not so different from the reading of a conventional representation of space on a two-dimensional surface. In this case, and following Rose, Sandback said that “illusions are just as real as facts, and facts just as ephemeral as illusions". In that sense, the prints (two dimensions) which Oh sometimes introduces into his “exhibitions” are not out of place.
Oh does not stop at the whims of perspective and nor does he seem to care whether the works have a certain configuration. In any case, it is difficult to have control over the work once it has been completed. Although Oh manipulates light in order to create effects and illusions, he knows that light already distorts perception and invites you to contemplate the dissolution of the limits and the edges and what would become of us if we found the way to penetrate its blinding surface. Although Oh directs our attention towards this or that, in the end he aims to question our vision, in how he places his own compositions based on an operation of forces and relation of forms which never allows us to apprehend them in their entirety, but rather, when we are not really looking, when we are not paying attention, when we do not give them the opportunity, so that our mind and our vision no longer have the ability to seize upon things, it is at that point that all our ideas fall apart.
There, the works become open realities, open to something which transcends them but which the works themselves, and the language, are incapable of defining or understanding. There, language is no longer operative. There, I construct the work which leads me towards my disappearance. Towards the void.