Oh: Yes. For a long time I've thought about the gap between the painter's eye and the viewer's eye. This work was deliberately set up to create what I call a disturbance of viewing distance² — a disruption of the familiar position from which we look at art. Does that sound strange?

 

Claude:  Not at all — it's a remarkably precise setup. "Disturbance of viewing distance" — that's an interesting phrase. Usually a painting is designed so the viewer can read it comfortably from a fixed distance. You're intentionally unsettling that comfort. One more question: if a viewer passes through the disturbance without noticing it — just experiences it as a pretty painting — did the disturbance work, or not?

 

Oh: That's a sharp question. In that case, no — it didn't work. And at the same time, it may simply be that the event wasn't needed by that particular viewer. The disturbance is meant to shift the position of looking.

 

Claude: "Shift the position of looking" — that lands with some weight. A shift in position isn't just seeing something differently; it means becoming aware of yourself in the act of seeing. A sudden moment of asking: what am I looking at, and how?

 

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¹ Saekdong: A traditional Korean pattern of multicolored vertical stripes, most commonly seen in children's ceremonial clothing. The image carries associations of festivity, childhood, and cultural heritage.

 

² Disturbance of viewing distance: The artist's own term for a deliberate strategy of unsettling the viewer's assumed position — physical, psychological, or cultural — in relation to a work of art.

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2. The Distance Between Painting and Art

 

Claude: You said earlier that "not every painting becomes a work of art." For someone who thinks technical skill is what makes art, that might sound unfamiliar. Could you say more about what you mean by the distance between painting and art?

 

Oh: Painting well and having artistic value are somewhat different things. Skill is a functional matter — like a plasterer spreading cement smoothly and evenly. That's also why, if you survey twentieth-century contemporary art, you'll find very few paintings that are technically accomplished in the traditional sense. Modern art began as a movement of suspicion toward the pre-modern tradition of equating skilled painting with art. Take Claude Monet's landscapes — we find them beautiful, or say they are well painted. But what exactly does "well painted" mean in that case? If it means "pleasing to look at," is that response an original aesthetic instinct, or a learned one? That's why I said earlier that seeing is not a simple act. Our eyes have very likely been standardized through the repeated intake of enormous amounts of information — and what I'm trying to shake loose is precisely that standardized eye.

 

Claude: The point about Monet is interesting. The idea that the emotion we feel in front of his paintings might be learned — that could be uncomfortable to hear at first. "Does that mean what I felt was fake?" Are you denying that emotion itself, or are you questioning its source?

 

Oh: Not fake — but worth asking whether it's real. Consuming beauty is not difficult; producing it is another matter. As is well known, the Impressionists were ridiculed when they first appeared. So why have they since become something like mythology?

 

Claude: That reversal is the crux of it. The paintings didn't change — what changed was the eye looking at them, and the cultural environment that shaped that eye. Museums hung them, textbooks taught them, the market assigned them astronomical prices — and a consensus formed: this is beautiful. Which means institutions played a role in that mythologizing — galleries, criticism, the market, education. Do you think those institutions broadened our way of seeing, or did they domesticate it?

 

Oh: Both, I think. But I believe we need to absorb both influences. It's not a matter of one being right and the other wrong — rather, one era thinks and receives things a certain way, and then different ideas come along to correct the course and expand the depth and breadth of what's possible.

 

Claude: That's a balanced view. Not a rejection of institutions, but an understanding that each generation questions the conventions institutions have produced — and that's how things move forward. In a sense, the history of art has been a continuous version of that process. And your own work sits within that current. But you've said you want to expel image, narrative, composition — even abstract expression — from the canvas. Is your work the next question in that long history, or a fundamental suspicion of the history itself?

 

Oh: I'm working from a premise of fundamental suspicion toward the whole of that history — but what I'm searching for can't be something of equivalent magnitude. I'm adding a single dot to that history: approaching it from this angle, with these doubts, exploring alternatives in this way.

 

Claude: "Adding a single dot to history" — that sounds remarkably honest. Not a grand declaration, but the words of someone who knows precisely where they stand. A dot with the full weight of a person behind it. How much does that dot weigh, for you?

 

Oh: That dot has to carry my full weight. But in relation to the whole of history, I think it amounts to about the weight of a single dot.

 

 

3. Emptying to Fill

 

Claude: You said you want to expel image, narrative, composition — even abstract expression — from the canvas. What remains after all of that has been cleared away? And what do you do with what's left?

 

Oh: I often describe it as emptying to fill. Driving out "image, narrative, composition, even abstract expression" is a way of filling the canvas with something else — not ideology or formal principles, but the more primal forces that everyone possesses equally: sensation, time, the latent energy of thought. The pure line of charcoal, freed from the figure of a "beautiful" woman drawn with charcoal. The character and expression of matter itself. I once wrote an essay I called Inwang Jegaekdo with the Mountain Erased³ — the idea being that we need to look directly at essence rather than at concept or reference.

 

Claude: "The character and expression of matter" — that's a striking phrase. Every painter throughout history has used charcoal and paint, but in all those cases the materials were subordinated to the subject being depicted. Are you saying that the materials themselves can speak? Could you show me what that looks like in practice — using this morning's painting as an example?

 

Oh: Every painter has used charcoal and paint — seeing with their own eyes, working with their own hands, through the act of making. But in every case, those materials converged on the subject, the purpose. That was true of Duchamp, Cézanne, and Gyeomjae⁴ alike. What I've come to think is that the charcoal line or the brushstroke itself — as used by those artists — carries as much meaning as the forms or structures they produced. The color and texture of charcoal, of paint. And those materials are entities with a clear existence of their own, which allows them to maintain a certain distance from the preconceptions and conventions that accompany form and ideology. The artist, meanwhile, can reveal those materials in their richness through their own aesthetic sensibility — and the viewer can feel that. We could always see it alongside form; we just weren't looking at it, because we were too busy looking at form. When image and narrative are removed from the canvas, these things come into focus. They've moved from extra to lead role. What I'm looking for is a way to draw out intervention and variation without the materials losing their own nature.

 

Claude: "From extra to lead role" — that's very clear. But I'd like to ask more about what it means to "draw out intervention and variation without the materials losing their own nature." It sounds like the artist is neither leaving the materials entirely alone nor fully dominating them — the artist's role exists somewhere in between.

 

Oh: Take this morning's painting as an example. Do you see the cluster of paint at the very top, where the color begins? That's where it starts. I squeeze paint from the tube and form a mass, spray water onto the canvas, then push part of the mass downward with a brush. As I do, the amount of paint gradually decreases, it fades, and over time it begins to spread. It's a physical phenomenon — and the hidden qualities of the paint reveal themselves. A single color shows a richer range of variation than you might expect, and where it meets the adjacent color, the two mix and produce new effects. I anticipate the general shape of what will happen and design this process accordingly — but the precise outcome is something I neither painted nor could paint. I call it painting together with the material.

 

Claude: "Painting together with the material" — I think that may be one of the most important phrases in this conversation. The unpredictable moments — when paint spreads in an unexpected direction, when colors mix in ways you didn't foresee — what does that feel like?

 

Oh: I've never thought of myself as making a work. I've always planned and designed, but what I've wanted is for the object, the video, the charcoal, the paint to step forward and speak — and I've tried to listen to that more carefully than anyone. I find it beautiful — paint seeping, spreading, mixing on canvas. Absolutely and purely beautiful. In those moments, I feel my senses and my aesthetic awareness open to their fullest.

 

Claude: "Absolutely and purely beautiful" — that's a special phrase. Earlier you suggested that the beauty we feel before a Monet might be learned. Is the beauty of paint spreading and mixing a different kind of beauty from that? When you say "absolutely and purely beautiful," where does that purity come from?

 

Oh: The beauty in Monet's surface depends, ultimately, on his reputation, on the high prices his work commands, on the near-deafening praise surrounding it. Anyone who has stood close to his paintings will have noticed that the soft pastel tones are not what they seem — it's an optical illusion. Monet said he was painting light, but that's just something people say. Light and color operate on different principles. You can't actually paint light — which means the idea of painting light is an ideology. So yes, it's a beauty of an entirely different order from the pure physical phenomenon of paint spreading and mixing. I'm not saying one is more beautiful than the other — only that they are different.

 

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³ Inwang Jegaekdo with the Mountain Erased: A reference to Inwang Jegaekdo , a celebrated landscape painting by the Korean master Jeong Seon (1676–1759), depicting Mount Inwang after rain. The artist uses this title metaphorically: to erase the mountain — the recognizable subject — and attend only to what remains.

⁴ Gyeomjae : The pen name of Jeong Seon (1676–1759), one of the most revered painters in Korean art history, known for developing a distinctly Korean style of landscape painting called jingyeong sansuhwa (true-view landscape painting).

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4. Western-Centrism and One Event

 

Claude: That distinction comes through very clearly. But how did you arrive at this question? I'd like to go back to where the work began.

 

Oh: At twenty, I stumbled into a guest lecture where I saw Duchamp's urinal for the first time. I had an immediate instinct: ah, so this is what contemporary art is. I've often said that Duchamp led me into contemporary art that day. It's also why the first work I presented after graduating — as a practicing artist — was four urinals, a parody of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. I submitted them to the Indépendants⁵ in Seoul in 1985. It was a choice with multiple layers of meaning, but it only drew laughter. The title was fountain-false-fable-four, and the name listed as the submitting artist was Marcel Duchamp.

 

Claude: Four urinals parodying Duchamp's Fountain — fountain, false, fable, four. And listing the submitting artist as "Marcel Duchamp." This isn't simple parody; it holds several layers of question at once. You said it only drew laughter — but what was the question you were actually trying to ask with that work? Could you put it in today's language?

 

Oh: I had come to think of Duchamp's Fountain as an event aimed at provocation — an important event. But as institutions absorbed it, I felt the event had been distorted into mythology; there was perhaps an inevitable dimension to that. And I thought that mythologization had caused Duchamp's readymade to fall into the trap of conceptualization. I wanted to trace that back and bring it to attention. Arranging four urinals in a cross, facing each other, was also a parody of Duchamp's playfulness — a critical work.

 

Claude: If Duchamp's Fountain was an event asking "can this too be art?" — then your four urinals were asking "how do we regard the fact that this event has itself become mythology?" You weren't repeating the event; you were retracing the process by which it became institutionalized. And the fact that this work drew only laughter in Seoul in 1985 — it means a critically reflexive response to Duchamp appeared in an environment where Duchamp himself had barely been absorbed. Do you think that gap led to a long experience of being unread?

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⁵ Indépendants: A non-juried, open-submission exhibition format originating in France, adopted in Korea as a venue for experimental and unconventional work outside mainstream institutional channels.