The artist’s works at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Los Angeles find something lyrical in the simple manipulation of space
Jong Oh’s solo exhibition Goosewing is a presentation of ten intimately sized sculptures rendered in the artist’s signature style: fine lines and pared-down volumes that manage to be conspicuously precise without appearing rigid. Oh’s work, made of everyday materials such as wood, fishing wire, string and marbles, calls to mind that of the avant-garde modernist movement Mono-ha, whose members in Japan and Korea explored the properties of such everyday materials during the 1960s. Yet, while the conceptual gestures of Mono-ha were grand and voluminous in scale, Oh’s spatial orchestration is softer, more contemplative and less raw. He seems to relish the sort of lyrical manipulation of space that elevates the lowkey, underappreciated line to an esteemed leitmotif.
Here, Oh’s delicate sculptures shift between visibility and camouflage. There are three acrylic-pipe-and-led sculptures titled Light Drawing (all works 2024), but they hang from above and are relatively out of sight. These fixtures can be mistaken for standard and parabolic shaped fluorescent tubes, emitting a rather clinical luminescence unceremoniously absorbed by the existing lighting system of the gallery. Meanwhile, three roughly A4-paper-size Folding Drawing works, consisting of white-painted wood panels in varying shapes ornamented by articulated wire and placed against the crisp white walls of the gallery, create a relieflike optical effect that engages the architecture and viewer in a kind of scintillating, almost choreographed, shadow play. The architecture of these ‘drawings’ is laid bare while being cunningly elusive, standing both at odds and in sync with the rest of Los Angeles, a city that operates under the auspices of sensorial cacophony and impermanence.
Oh’s constellation of sculptures does not overwhelm. Even in their strict concern with topology, the works feel simultaneously unremarkable and poetic. While the materials are rudimentary – as admitted in the press release – the artist somehow manages to capture an expressive poise in the works that begs one to look beyond facile sensation. Despite or even due to Oh’s reduction of sculpture to its essentials (volume and form) without much, if any, radical preamble, the objects come across as self-contained, yet assimilable to grander minimalist narratives. At times, Oh veers too close to conventional ornamentation for his own good. And that’s perhaps because works like Line Sculpture (marble with bead) #1, composed of angular dark-brown wood, wire, bead and marble, do not sufficiently respond to the (im)possibilities of minimalism as a genre. One might extend the grace of reading Oh’s standard material treatment vis-à-vis a conceptual artist’s interest in seriality, though even this affordance hangs in delicate balance against the works’ flat affect. Given this, the tensions in Oh’s pieces function kind of like an improperly resolved chord progression that makes a listener, however misguided, yearn for more.
Goosewing at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Los Angeles, 5 January – 8 February
From the Spring 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy
