Text by

Pina Schroeder

 

William Faulkner once said that the final aim of an artist is to stop movement, which is life, through artificial means, and freeze it, so that in a hundred years it can start moving again to the eyes of a new observer.

It's in this dichotomy between movement-life and art-immobility that Seung hwan Oh elaborates his stylistic hallmark, capsizing the terms of Faulkner's assumption but, at the same time, implicitly reconfirming it.

 

The bacteria-rotten photography becomes life: it becomes an evolving artwork, subject to fortuity in an impermanent and ephemeral flow that is the essence of life itself. On the opposite, life stands still, with the awareness of its transient nature, a nature which is observed and accepted without dramatization, with the inquiring look that equates the artist to the scientist.

Seung Hwan Oh reflects on this ephemeral, impermanent nature of existence. He fixes it on his work, crystallizing its moment, stopping its movement. And the artwork - which is life - then becomes stasis again, paradoxically reconfirming Faulkner's assumption in a dialectic circle.

 

Brassai said: "Photography shall neither insist nor explain, just suggest,". This is what Seung Hwan Oh does:he shows an idea that runs through the eyes right to the mind of the obserber, and it stays therewith the spontaneity of the ephemeral and the simplicity of impermanence.