Installation view of 《Remorse》 (YOUNHYUN STAGE 02, 2024) © YOUNHYUN STAGE 02 

Serin Oh works by staging ironic events discovered in relation to humans and their surroundings within a single space. Moving across the boundaries1) between what we know, what we think we know, what we do not know, and what we think we do not know, the artist removes context from events.

She mixes cheap accessories that might be found on a street stall and moves between the white cube and the runway (Imitation & Deception), or combines 3D printing and ceramics to boldly realize in the exhibition space a virtual waterway that seems as though it could only exist inside a game (《Forest Temperature Bunker》).

By arbitrarily dismantling existing narratives and contexts, and by mixing and juxtaposing the images that remain, Oh grants new narratives to events. I met Serin Oh at the exhibition space in Nonhyeon-dong, where she presented her new work Immigrants, made in memory of plants that had come from distant foreign lands and died in Korea.

“For the areca palm that came from Africa, Korea’s cold and dry winter was a season difficult to be loved in.
The stems and leaves that had completely withered said they remembered times of decoration and celebration.
I told them stories I had seen in lands full of green, and prepared a place where they could lie down for a while.”
-Artist’s Note-

On the gray cement floor lie pale brown stems and leaves of plants dried stiff. These plants, which had passed through long journeys of unknown stories from Africa or Southeast Asia to Korea, did not make it through the winter. For the dead plants, Serin Oh shaped lumps of clay, colored them in hues resembling the plants, and pushed them into the kiln as though applying makeup.

The ceramics juxtaposed with the plants, bent or sagging in their own way, do not presuppose “use” or “being seen.” The plants lying horizontally no longer need to stand upright vertically; leaning against the solid ceramics, they are being consoled in the final moments of their existence. Plants that grew from the earth are returning once again to the embrace of soil.

The process of dismantling events after research and overturning hierarchies belongs to a typical “artistic” grammar, but Oh’s distinctive “craft-based” working method and post-processing complete a unique aesthetic of her own.

Having majored in metal craft during both her undergraduate and master’s programs, Oh actively uses in her work the boldness that comes from the volume and weight of metal, as well as the matte surface or glossy quality that comes from matte or polished finishes. Images that have been replicated and reassembled with their contexts removed are reborn as metal(-like) or ceramic(-like) sculpture(-like) forms and acquire an artistic aura.


Installation view of 《Forest Temperature Bunker》 (BYFOUNDRY, 2022) © FOUNDRY SEOUL. Photo: : Kyung Roh.

In the exhibition 《Forest Temperature Bunker》, held at BYFOUNDRY in Hannam-dong in 2022, Serin Oh combined 3D printing and ceramics to create 18 surreal series-landscapes. The 3D-printed works in the upper sections were produced using open-source spatial modeling data available on the internet, and were painted with acrylic spray used for automobile paint in order to match the tone of the ceramics in the lower sections.

The completed works retain a hard and angular feeling on the outer surface, while their gloss appears differently from each angle, adding a cybernetic image. They seem to visually realize a strange world in which what was believed to be alive is (perhaps) dead, and what was thought to be dead returns to life.

In reality, they are virtual artificial tanks sufficient for the Nakdong River lenok and the Han River lenok, which grew in different environments, to swim together.


Serin Oh, Imitation & Deception No.2011-25, 2011, 925silver, 16x22.5x2.5cm © Serin Oh

The events and ironies captured by the artist’s gaze generally share the commonality of having arisen from capitalism. Ornamental plants and lenok alike were displaced from their homes by capital and transplanted by capital. In the early ‘Imitation & Deception’ series, the thematic awareness aimed at the operating mechanism of capitalism—in which the price visibly displayed on the surface becomes value—is described much more explicitly.

Jewelry made by combining inexpensive accessories overturns the hierarchy between so-called “luxury” jewelry as positional goods and the “counterfeits” that imitate them.

And, like the nature of capitalism in which “it is fine as long as (even if fake in outward appearance) it is pretty,”2) they are rapidly re-incorporated into the system as “real” through fashion magazine editorials and the like. Once the works leave the artist’s hands, they live and move more creatively than the artist’s original intention, continuing to weave original narratives.

In the ‘Imitation & Deception’ series, Serin Oh once presented a video work titled Birds Lose Their Heads in Order to Fly. By beginning from distribution centers such as Dongdaemun and Namdaemun and tracing production sites in China and Vietnam, she completes a single narrative.

In the video, Mr. Nam, who runs a cheap accessory factory, says the following: “Artists can only satisfy 1%, can’t they? We satisfy 99%.” Serin Oh added the following about this: “There was a time when I also divided the world into 1% and 99% and saw it almost like a dichotomy, but while doing research, I think I gradually came to believe that the world is a place where many different values are mixed together.”

Humans cannot help but be extremely human-centered beings, yet here is an artist who seeks to find, in the world of the 99%, the materials for making works directed toward the 1% of appreciators. This is the point that makes one look forward to how Serin Oh’s new ceramic series, moving between art and craft, will continue.


1. Re-cited from Jo Juri, “Journey of Wonders—Swimming with a Large Tail, Swimming Back Upstream with Fine Scales (細鱗)” (《Forest Temperature Bunker》, BYFOUNDRY, 2022)
2. Re-cited from Choi Bum and Serin Oh, Ways of Arranging Sparkle, artist talk transcript (Seum Art Space, 2018)

References