January 27 – March 23, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, January 27th 6-8pm

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Bending Moment, an exhibition of drawing and sculpture by Jong Oh—the artist’s second presentation at the gallery.

In a first encounter with an artwork by Jong Oh, from afar, his work registers as a delicate and precise line drawing—the black outline of a cube, for instance—improbably levitating, devoid of any substrate, in three-dimensional space. What appears to be a thin stroke of ink seems to have been removed from paper or canvas and made to float in mid-air. Closer inspection reveals the work is not a drawing at all—but a sculpture of thread or fine black jewelry chain and thin metal rods, held aloft by a few cleverly arranged lengths of practically invisible monofilament. For Oh, the boundary between a drawing and a sculpture is more a question of time—attention, awareness—than dimensionality.

Each of his several bodies of work might be thought of as line drawings made with three-dimensional materials:

The Line Sculptures center around a square dowel of unfinished walnut. The wood might form the shape of an L, with one section fixed to the wall vertically and another protruding perpendicularly. Sometimes he balances a found blue marble on top of the dowel, or he dangles a length of fine chain underneath to create a straight and plumb vertical line.

The Folding Drawings are made with small pieces of Masonite that appear to be crisply folded into either two or three planes—one of which hangs flush against the wall, while the others angle away from it. Oh paints the Masonite white, except for its edges, which he leaves raw to create the appearance of a boundary line for each plane. Thin, stiff wire curves between the Masonite’s vertices to imply a third or fourth invisible surface in the composition.

Room Drawings are more expansive installations—less haiku than haibun (a related literary form that combines poetry and prose—still pithy, but without strict limitations on length or structure). They respond more directly to the spaces where they are installed, sometimes including several long pieces of thread that stretch almost the entire distance between ceiling/floor or one wall and another. Oh uses white thread (essentially invisible in a white room) that he paints black in sections to selectively reveal. If a thread is fixed to a wall, Oh might only paint it black once it is far enough away from the wall to appear mysteriously unmoored. He could leave the middle of another piece of thread unpainted between two blackened sections to create a similar illusion of discontinuity. He suspends rectangles of Plexiglas in space—a sheet of clear plastic, invisible except for the edges he intensifies with a black Sharpie or the subtle shadows of light cast on a nearby wall. Small jagged stones found in a surrounding neighborhood sometimes act as counterweights keeping a delicately engineered artwork taut with right angles. Temporarily lifting such a stone is its own magic trick: without its pull, suddenly an entire composition of interconnected horizontal lines succumbs to gravity and droops—a shocking sight after acclimating to the way Oh’s installations seem to defy the normal laws of physics.

When Oh arrives in a space he has been invited to work with, he is carrying little more than a small bag of supplies—and no plan of what he will make. He listens to the room. Its details, personality, and eccentricities lead him to the decisions that shape his sculptures. He trusts the space will speak to him; he trusts he will find a way to say something back with his humble materials. Arched doorways might echo into similarly curved sculptures. Plain, quiet, white-box galleries can bear more restrained compositions than rooms with walls of poured concrete or a vaulted ceiling. Oh’s artworks are negotiations in balance and tension for any number of dichotomies and spectrums: gravity and weightlessness, architecture and negative space, implication and actuality, degrees of perceptibility.

When asked to produce an exhibition for the Choi Man Lin Museum—the converted former studio of a modernist Korean artist, which has a freestanding staircase, shiplapped ceiling, and several conspicuous windows and doors all made of red cedar and all in the exhibition space—Oh immediately realized he needed to reinvent his material vocabulary to produce a line strong enough to stand alongside an environment with such powerful character. He would work with lines of light. White neon was his first impulse—but the noise these lights produced in testing (a faint buzz) kept the material from being sufficiently otherworldly. Ultimately, he arrived at using long, thin, straight (and happily inaudible) LED acrylic tubing he could bend angles and curves into with a heat gun and suspend from the ceiling with monofilament. The delicate, floating, three-dimensional drawings in light—simultaneously novel and quintessentially Jong Oh—hung in perfect balance with the idiosyncratic museum chamber.

Ever since he was a boy, Oh has preferred listening to speaking. In a world where logorrheic personalities often rise to prominence, Oh once went through a period of questioning his own gentle nature, his tendency to focus on others rather than himself, his predisposition toward sensitivity rather than assertiveness (as if such traits were liabilities). “Eventually, I came to accept this about myself,” he says, transforming a source of self-doubt into a subtle and sophisticated visual language that invites viewers to pay closer attention to the world around them. When asked if he ever thinks of his sculptures as self-portraits, he says no, not consciously. “But if that’s the case, at least I’ve been honest,” he laughs—honest to his own fiber as well as the materials and spaces he works with. Wherever he goes, Oh carries with him his mother’s encouragement to embody the present moment: “Whatever you have in your hands,” she would say, “you are only ever borrowing for a short time. You arrive in this world with nothing—and so too, you depart with nothing.”

Jong Oh, born in 1981 in Mauritania, lives and works in Seoul. He has mounted solo shows at Art in General’s Musée Miniscule (New York), CR Collective (Seoul), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Massachusetts), DOOSAN Gallery (Seoul), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea), and University of Connecticut’s Contemporary Art Galleries. He has participated in exhibitions at ARTER (Istanbul), BRIC Rotunda Gallery (New York), Busan Museum of Art (South Korea), ChoiManLin Museum (Seoul), Deoksugung Palace (Seoul), GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (Germany), Hudson Valley MOCA (New York), Jebiwool Art Museum (South Korea), Museum SAN (South Korea), Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (Germany), and ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Germany). His work is in the collections of Fundación Otazu (Spain), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Santa Barbara Art Museum, and SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation (Seoul).