Gwon Osang

executed in 2007

Arario Gallery, Seoul
Acquired directly from the above by the current owner

Beijing, Arario Gallery, Osang Gwon, June-August 2007 

Osang Gwon, ARARIO, Korea, 2008, cover & pp. 20, 30-33

This work is in very good condition overall.
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Born 1974 in Seoul, Korea, Osang Gwon received both his B.F.A. and M.F.A from Hong-Ik University, College of Art, Sculpture Department, Seoul, Korea. He lives and works in Seoul.

 

The current work is from his Deodorant Type series, where he creates sculptural forms from hundreds of photographic fragments, each of different aspects of the original subject, which are laid onto life-size mannequins in their respective corresponding locations. This series was first presented to the public by the artist in 1998, creating a new genre known as photography sculpture, influenced by Pop Art, traditional still life painting and portraiture.

 

From a distance, the current work, Control, almost resembles porcelain but its true composition is revealed upon close inspection. The realization that the 3D work is made from a traditionally 2D medium, redefines and restructures our conceptions of both photography and sculpture.

 

Gwon forms the skins of his characters from scratch, picture by picture. Each photographic image is a basic building block with which when assembled as an aggregate whole, forms a representation of a being. As individual photographs—a patch of skin or the seam of a shirt—each piece has seemingly little significance: it is only when they are assembled by Gwon that they are given meaning as part of a whole. The people he chooses to portray are all ordinary people, and in this choice of subject-matter, the viewer is made to see that people and life itself, just like his sculptures, are made up from the assimilation of many individual parts, which have little meaning or purpose without the context of the whole.

 

The title of this work, as well as the series comes from Gwon's fascination with today's force-fed consumer culture. In the modern world our identities are often not as self-controlled as one might think: the ordinary person is modelled and fashioned in the way one dresses, cuts one's hair etc., as the result of clever and often subliminal marketing of consumer brands. Our identities are made up by the various parts we choose consciously or subconsciously to represent ourselves. By choosing this title, the artist makes us question the skin we ourselves are in, criticizing the force-fed consumer culture of the 21st century that controls our identity more than we do.