Bringing together thirty years of work, Efremidis presents Oh Sufan’s (*1946, KR) first major survey in Germany. The exhibition takes place at the gallery in Berlin, our window vitrines and at the Villa Sarre in Potsdam.
Oh Sufan’s crosses boundaries and clichés. He makes “Western paintings that are very Korean,” said the artist Kim Byung-Ki about him. Like the passing of time, day after day, his paintings are animated, continuously growing, appearing and disappearing. To this day, he remains “loyal to the instinct of childish play”. Shift- ing through these layers, Oh Sufan’s life and work were shaped by contradictions, dissonance and collision.
Part of an ongoing lineage of critical abstraction, his contribution to contemporary painting is widely recognized in South Korea. The artist continues to resist stagnation: “I believe that contradictions coexist exactly because they are different. It can be dangerous to focus on a single idea.”
His recent works are filled with a freedom of deviation, as they have broken away even from the abstract expressionist or calligraphic characteristics of the East. As if to mock the formal completeness of plastic arts, they are loyal to the instinct of childish play.
Chung Young-Mok, Seoul National University
