Marcel Duchamp, La Fountain, 1917

Sangghil Oh, fountain–false–fable–four, four urinals, 1985

fountain–false–fable–four (four urinals, 1985)

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In 1985, I presented my first work as an artist at the Seoul Independents exhibition. The work was submitted under the name of Marcel Duchamp rather than my own.

Four urinals were installed on separate pedestals, arranged in a cross so that they faced one another. Two would have been enough. I chose four because the number produces a structure rather than a repetition.

The work was titled fountain–false–fable–four.

I had been deeply sympathetic to the trajectory of contemporary art, yet I was also struggling with a question: how could one intervene in the historical framework of Western art without merely repeating it?

Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) had once operated as an event that unsettled the boundary between art and everyday life. Over time, however, the urinal became absorbed into the institutional narrative of art history. What had been an event gradually hardened into a concept.

This work attempted to shift that situation once again. By placing a readymade within the frame of Duchamp’s authorship, I intended to move the axis of meaning and to show that authorship is not an essence but an effect of positioning.

In that sense, these four urinals were not a repetition of Duchamp’s gesture but a kind of reverse reading — an attempt to return the conceptualized readymade to the condition of an event. In that sense, the work was both a critical dialogue with a respected predecessor and a playful homage to the spirit Duchamp himself enjoyed.

The methodology of repositioning first articulated here later appeared, in various forms, throughout my work. That it was rarely recognized at the time was less a failure of communication than a matter of asynchrony between the work and its viewers.