| The Bubble Man, From Soap Bubbles to Phantasmal Games | |
The Bubble Man, From Soap Bubbles to Phantasmal Games KHO Chunghwan ∙ Critic OH Donghoon gained inspiration for his present oeuvre of sculptures from children playing with soap bubbles. When blowing out soap bubbles from a container using a straw. globular shapes of various sizes show their condensed forms. And when blowing them out into the void. only then the condensed bubbles form perfect spheres. and disperse into the open air. These perfect spherical bubbles, cast with the brilliant colors of the rainbow spectrum, hover midair momentarily until they leave without a trace with a pop!. And that is when the children begin to eagerly blow on their straws, hungry for the resplendent colors of the bubbles. For children engaging in bubble play, it is possible that this is nothing more or less than a fun pastime which piques their curiosities. However, the bubble play comes toward as a signification, not a mere pastime, to the adult watching over the children. While children become infatuated by the form, adults try to find the meaning. What does that form signify (what kind of a situation is this)? For adults, therefore, the bubble play comes as a childhood recollection, which also brings along a belated sense of loss. This occurs only after the forms have been sufficiently signified. Through an adult's eye, the bubble play is a fantasy play. It is a play in which fantasy is created before the eye, a play in which fantasy is summoned (and art is a technique which creates fantasy/phantasm). The child persistently desires to see the resplendent colors which radiate so transparently. For the adult, this seems to be an act of summoning a dream before the eyes. Soap bubbles are akin to dreams they hover quixotically, are so much more splendid than the reality, and disappear after a fleeting moment of seduction. To reiterate more soberly, it is as if the bubbles are interlocked with the vanitas still life paintings which have transferred the message of the frailty of human life onto canvas, or the contemporary version of The Butterfly Dream by Zhuangzi, which vacillates (as if being captured in a bubble) between dream and reality, the butterfly and the dreams. Is this not exactly what life is? Is life not a dream? Or, how would one be able to endure life without any dreams? Are dreams not the force which provides momentum for life, the reason for the propulsion of life? It is probable that the artist had these thoughts in mind whilst watching over children playing with bubbles. This is how the Bubble Man was created. Because the Bubble Man originated from bubble, its physiology and form had to also be derived from bubbles. For example, its smallest unit has to be spherical, just like the bubbles. It has to be as light and transparent as bubbles, and must possess the property of reflecting the external environment. And just like soap bubbles in a container, the structure adjoining sphere to sphere must be repetitive as well as expansive. Its form must be spontaneous and nonlinear. Though not made of actual bubbles, it must at least give off such impression as it is the transference of bubbles to sculptural form. Thus, the Bubble Man must adopt qualities (or perhaps virtues) of zero gravity, transparency, reflectivity, repetition, expansion, spontaneity, nonlinearity, and the contingency and variability resulting from the lack of definitive from despite being formed by bubbles. In actuality, these properties discovered and confirmed in the artist's sculptures are strikingly modern. The artist's sculptures are made circular by cutting and putting together stainless steel spheres. Both big and small spheres are adjoined, and expanded to create various forms. Once the desired form is achieved, the surface is either glossed in order to emphasize the mirror-like reflectivity of the stainless steel medium, or finished with urethanc paint. When viewing the completed sculpture, despite the basic form having derived from spheres, no two shapes are exactly the same. Apart from the fact that they all have expanded from the primitive cell of a sphere, all forms are distinctve. Because the artist does not use casts, no editions exist. He displays exceptional technique in materializing three-dimensional images, and is able to directly transfer from blueprints to sculptures. Though it may seem perfectly feasible to generate identical forms by way of this process, when considering the manual labor during its actual production, it is impossible in principle. But it is possible to give off the feeling of identicalness or similarity. This feeling, this vague impression of similarity, is significant in the artist's sculptures, and especially within the level of discourse. The Bubble Man is already significant in this sense. The Bubble Man does not exist as a real life - he is a virtual human being. 'It' is nothing more than an illusion brought about by the idea that a coincidental form made of bubbles resembles a human being. All of the artist's sculptures are like that. Sculptures that resemble human beings, dogs, and soaring horses all reconfirm preconceptions towards each subject, but are not the actual subjects themselves. They mimic, imitate, and borrow from self-identities, but do not revert to them. Then what is self-identity? It is a means to point out, a method used by institutions to specify individual subjects. It is an institutional inertia (resistance to change). And the arts innately searches for its reason for being in the midst of anti-institutional, practical logic. It thrusts the logic of disidentification in the face of the logic of self-identity, confronts the logic of disparity, and disturbs the institution's inertia. In any case, things which don't revert to nothing other than the specified 'subjets' indeed exist, and their ways of being should be respected. The artist generates disparity by borrowing from the logic of self-identity and by appropriating institutional inertia-just like the bubbles that generate coincidental forms (the arts is a technique of distinction). As an overstatement, despite these 'things' being actual, tangible, real-life 'things,' they are nothing more than apparitions. They are ghosts that haunt on the boundaries between truth and illusion, reality and unreality; they are deja vus, mirages which may just exist way over there. Moreover, the component of origin being from bubbles only strengthens their unreality. It is important to make these unrealistic things appear, these things which, despite surely existing in real life, do not possess inherent color nor form. It is also important to bring back these said 'things' which reside in the chasm and rift, boundary and inherence, to bring invsible things back to the realm of visibility (the arts is a means to give form to the formless). The forms are buoyant. Of course, they are not actually buoyant because these things are made of metal, but the artist's touch makes them so. And once luster is added onto the surface of stainless steel, it becomes a mirror. When the surface is sheened to an extreme, the mirror becomes an expansion of reality and an existence. It makes it seems like nothing is there; it seems like nothing is there, but there is. The mirror contains a reflection of reality. The single reality of reality and mirrored reality co-existing together is realized. An impossible reality is reality is realized. And here, reality is converted to unreality. It is the moment when the chasm and rift, boundary and inherence of the engagement between reality and unreality open. It is probable that the artist's sculptures are aiming precisely for that moment, and will run into that moment before long. This is the reason why the artist's sculptures come across as charming(within the realm sensation) and modernistic (within the level of discourse). The forms seem to float lightly like bubbles, and drift in zero gravity. Such weightlessness seems to resist against and contradick with gravity, inertia of a different kind of institution. Gravity, an institutional inertia, maintains a system's stability and is the homeostasis of the system which opts to retain such stability; it speaks of the reality principle. Thus, these forms created by bubbles are confronted and the artist's sculptures compared. Unrealistic, anti-gravity, drifting, phantasmal, nonlinear, accidental, labile, hovering, and transient. It is surprising that a sculpture should become so weightless. It is surprising that matter should disappear to such an extent. |
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| Passive sculpture proves its presence on active expanding From transformation and expansion of spheres to stillness and dynamism of human | |
Passive sculpture proves its presence on active expanding From transformation and expansion of spheres to stillness and dynamism of human Sculptor Donghoon Oh Arranging spheres to express human characteristics
The theme of metal weld sculptor Donghoon Oh is about human and sphere. While many plastic artists start at thinking of how to express, Oh starts at meeting the materials for expression. This means that Oh sees the expandability of the material he chooses. He makes basic shape with soil and various solid materials and applies metal weld. He then carries out cutting and attaching. As the preparation stage, Oh uses 3D programs to design and measure the work precisely. In order to express the invisible gravity of the work, Oh lays the spheres vertically to emphasize metallic texture, weights and visual effects. Since the first solo exhibition, Oh has mainly created works for outdoor installment. In the Adagio Series, Oh symbolizes the nature of human through connection and combination of the figure to express people’s personalities, culture and behavior rather than the body shape itself. It contains the features of kinetic mobile in which Oh wish to deliver a message to people to live slow and patient. For this reason, Oh made the work movable so that people can physically engage with the work. The certain scale of the spheres in arrangement shows the two sides of the human nature: artificiality and naturality. Oh also arranges the spheres in various layout such as coils and plane figures and sees the possibility of creating new arrangement: repeatable combination of spheres and (soap) bubbles - inspired by children’s playing with bubbles. Oh reproduces the elements of sentimentality being turned to dynamism. The division and repetition of the spheres forms the limbs that dreams of expanding themselves towards the air. As a result, Oh created ‘Bubble Man’. The spheres arranged as if they are a molecular structure in the work ‘Red Bubble’ shows active dynamic elements and expandability. It contains reinterpretation of warm and joyful human body like his other work ‘Going To You’. The spheres have gentle symbolism and give friendliness to appreciators. Oh cuts and welds the materials with sharpness but the round shape of the sphere and the properties of the materials make people warm. Oh’s style and conception can be seen as new and advanced in terms of expressing the nature of human but we should pay attention to the expressionism of stillness in his works. Because this is the theme of Bubble Man with which Oh wants to communicate with people in a slow pace. |
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ARTIST Criticism
