Time, Body, and Silence
Sangghil Oh
Time-based artist | Body | Resistance | Trace | Silence
“What cannot be said—must be drawn, screamed, or scattered.”
BODY
Sensation is always mediated through the body.
Repression and impulse, power and resistance, memory and the traces of action—
the body is both the first material of art,
and its final utterance.
Anonymous mirror, 1993
I was a body performing the other.
The mirror was an anonymous device wedged between.
At the threshold of anonymity and gender, the gaze loses its direction.
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Anonymous mirror, 1993 explores the power structure of the gaze and the performativity of gender. By displacing his own body into a "represented other," the artist collapses self-representation and strategies of othering, destabilizing the hierarchy between the viewer and the viewed. The gesture of covering the genitals—fragmented by the camera’s framing—echoes Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performative construction, and opens a space where it can be concealed, de-coded, or neutralized.
The anonymous male body questions visual fetishism and binary structures of subject-object dynamics, unsettling the viewer’s sense of agency in looking. Like Nan Goldin’s “I’ll be your mirror,” this piece uses the metaphor of the mirror as a space of reflection and fracture.
Ultimately, Anonymous mirror, 1993 deconstructs the ways gender and identity are constructed through visual discourse, positioning the body as a conceptual interface in contemporary art practice.
Hairlines of Control, 1993
The viewer walked between rows of hair.
Sound, smell, numbers, and spacing turned the installation into a field of control.
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bundles of hair from prisoners, heartbeat sounds, numbers, written messages, the entire space
Hairlines of Control, 1993 is an installation that spatializes control and sensory suppression through a visual language of alignment. Bundles of unwashed human hair are arranged on the floor in precise intervals—like silent soldiers—turning the space into a corridor of unspoken rules. Visitors walking between them are immersed in the raw smell of hair, irregular textures, and the dull echo of a heartbeat reverberating across the room.
The piece transforms the visitor from observer into a participant moving through a sensory prison. The hair—severed from the body but never fully detached—serves as a residue of identity erased, much like the remnants of prisoners stripped of individuality.
The installation reflects the anatomy of modern power structures—surveillance, control, and classification—not through narration, but through tactile discomfort. In this silent corridor, language is absent. What remains is memory embedded in the body.
Someone in the box, 1999
I locked myself in a box and performed the other.
That body was mine—and at once, it was yours.
someone in the box, 1999 is a media installation that displaces and deconstructs the body through the frame and medium. A 1-square-meter transparent glass box is lined with tracing paper, and fragments of the artist’s body are filmed from multiple angles as they press against the surfaces. The projected images show a distorted, de-formed body—stretched like sausage or compressed flesh trapped inside a cube.
The box is not just a container, but a visual prison—a structure of framing and gaze. The body within is both the artist’s and a projected double for the viewer’s unconscious. It acts as a metaphor for the “othered” image, reflected and refracted within our own perception.
This work questions how the body is fragmented, edited, and displaced within media. The act of voluntary confinement—“I made my own body imprisoned”—becomes a meta-critical gesture that confronts how we imagine subjectivity in an era of self-image and simulated presence.
Scream, 1999
There was only voice—no body.
That scream was mine,
and somehow,
it was also yours.
scream, 1999 is a psychological video installation built from space, body, and voice. Originating in the underground space of P.S.1 during the artist's residency, the work centers on a black cylinder (140cm in diameter) fitted with internal speakers. A distorted face—covered in flour and water—screams in the video projected from above, while its raw cry reverberates throughout the darkened room.
The artist intentionally positioned the cylinder at a height inaccessible to shorter viewers, but the gallery provided a step stool, inadvertently neutralizing the intended discomfort. The obstacle was not merely a barrier but an invitation to engage physically, to disrupt passive viewing.
scream functions as a sensory trap—disturbing image, disembodied voice, enclosed space, and a provoked body. It is not a scream from one who cannot speak, but from one forced into a reality where speech becomes impossible.
Untitled, 1989 / 2010 reinstalled
The body stopped in front of the blue circle.
It was not a color—but a threshold of sensation.
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untitled, 1989 / 2010 reinstalled is a large-scale circular installation composed of deep, pure blue pigment. More than a visual object, it functions as a field of sensation that draws in the viewer’s body, perception, and psychological state.
The scale, structure, and intense ultramarin blue—sharpened under bright light—along with the ambient scent of espresso coffee, create a subtle disorientation. The viewer feels as if the circle is floating or pulling them in, evoking a hallucinatory encounter.
Here, the “blue circle” is not merely a painted surface. It is a threshold of perception, a sensory portal in which both the artist’s and viewer’s bodies are implicated. At a certain moment, the viewer becomes aware of standing before it—not seeing with the eyes alone, but entering the space with the whole body.
This experience is a kind of visual performance, a resonance of presence shaped by body, pigment, light, and place.
This is where the resonance of the body ends.
You may now see and hear—
a different time, a different silence, and a different conversation.
pigment print, 140 x 100cm
5-channel video installationon a glass box, no sound
single channel video installation In the black cylinder, sound / One might flinch at the sudden sounds.
pigment, branches, animal bones, etc.