Originality & Identity

Kai Oh's work centers on capturing traces of life forms and environments within urban spaces, transforming them into tangible yet fluid forms. She employs digital editing to expand her subjects into imaginative scenes, reflecting her exploration of the materiality and transience of photographic images.

In the group exhibition 《Awkward Gaps》(Whitenoise, 2021), her series ‘Cat Series’(2021) involved cutting and weaving photographs of stray cats encountered in urban settings, emphasizing the materiality of the photographic medium by reconstructing them into new forms.

In the group exhibition 《Super-fine: Light Photography》(Ilmin Museum of Art, 2021), her ‘Semi-frame Series’(2021) utilized glass, wheels, and hinges, creating the impression of photographs that move within the space. This approach highlights her attempt to liberate photographs from a fixed plane and instead present them as fluid entities within the exhibition environment.

More recently, Oh has extended her practice to incorporate bodily imagery, pushing beyond the limitations of traditional photography. In her solo exhibition 《Will you Marry Me?》(Subtitled NYC, 2025), she presented the series ‘Unpleasant Episodes’(2025), which critically examines the duality of the female body. By employing collages of breasts and nipples, she confronts the conflicting societal perceptions surrounding women's bodies while infusing her works with humor and provocation.

Style & Contents

Kai Oh's practice consistently experiments with the photographic medium, blending digital manipulation with hands-on techniques. Her early works often involved capturing urban traces with a smartphone and digitally transforming them, then printing, cutting, or combining the resulting images to emphasize their materiality.

In her solo exhibition 《Half Sticky》(IBK, 2023), she used sponges and temporary partition structures to move beyond the two-dimensional plane, creating installations that occupy physical space. This project challenged the static nature of photography by presenting it as a mutable medium closely intertwined with the spatial environment.

Oh combines digital editing with handcrafted elements, actively exploring the material properties of photography within physical spaces. In the group exhibition 《Temporary Landing》(TINC, 2022), her piece Tongue Bed(2022) distorted and layered images of mouths and soil, merging seemingly incompatible elements to evoke a disorienting sensory experience.

Her inventive approach to materials is evident in the group exhibition 《Autohypnosis》(G Gallery, 2023), where she displayed works such as Morningside Park Snail(2023), Web(in Pink, Green and 0)(2023), and Snail(Void)(2023). These installations feature images printed on diverse fabrics like velvet, silk, voile, cotton, and mesh. By shaping the printed fabrics according to their textures and transparencies, she created installations where the photographic image appeared to flow and shift within the space.

Topography & Continuity

Kai Oh's work has evolved toward emphasizing materiality by combining digital editing techniques with manual crafting processes. She challenges the limitations of the photographic medium by incorporating diverse materials such as glass, silk, and sponge, as well as using partition structures to extend photography into spatial installations. This approach reflects her effort to move beyond flat imagery, reconfiguring photography as a fluid presence within physical space.

From her early works highlighting marginalized urban entities to her recent pieces that utilize her own body as a subject, Oh continues to experiment with various motifs and forms, pushing the boundaries of her practice. The artist, who identifies herself as being interested in "flexibility, expandability, and recoverability," seeks to reveal the uncanny collisions that occur where reality and virtuality, nature and artifice, and presence and absence intersect. Through her unique imaginative approach, she explores these tensions and ambiguities, positioning her work at the crossroads of diverse aesthetic possibilities.