Oh Se-Yeol

Untitled, Mixed media, 145 x 209 cm, 1996

Gallery Joeun is pleased to present Oh Se-Yeol: Since 1965, a solo exhibition celebrating the 60th anniversary of Oh Se-Yeol’s artistic debut, on view from August 28 to September 20, 2025. This exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Oh’s artistic journey, spanning from his early figurative works to his recent paintings that merge semi-abstraction with symbols, numbers, and found objects. Guided by the conviction that “the moment one strives to paint well, purity disappears,” Oh has consistently pursued the essence of painting through simplicity. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to encounter his “untitled masterpieces” in one place.

Purity and Improvisation: Six Decades of Art

Oh Se-Yeol’s practice has always sprung from the everyday. Bottle caps, buttons, spoons, neckties, clumsily cut images, and fragments of text—objects reminiscent of children’s toys—find new life in his hands. These humble materials transcend their status as mere objects, resonating with poetic lyricism and leading viewers into a childlike world embedded in the unconscious. At times, a wooden basin or a wicker basket becomes a frame, while discarded objects are reborn as integral parts of his paintings. His art continuously crosses boundaries, bridging reality and imagination, daily life and art.

Oh’s pictorial method is equally distinctive. He reverses raw canvas, layers oil paint repeatedly while stripping away its oils, and embraces the cracks that time naturally inscribes on the surface. Eschewing brushes, he often turns to sharp tools—knives and awls—to scratch, incise, and scrape his canvases, generating free-form marks that embody his pictorial identity. Beneath the apparent simplicity of his works lies an accumulation of layered colors and dense textures, condensed into an expressive power born of immediacy and honesty. Childlike lines and forms reflect his inner self as an “adult with the heart of a child,” while his monochromatic backgrounds bear the stratified traces of passing time.

His unique artistic language soon attracted international attention. In 1984, he became the only Korean artist to record a sale at FIAC in Paris, an event that transcended mere market success to signify Korean contemporary art’s resonance on the global stage.

Untitled, Mixed media, 100 x 80 cm, 2015

A Language in Progress: Semiotics of Suggestion

Since the 1990s, Oh’s series of numbers has epitomized the essence of his practice. The uneven repetition of digits from one to ten feels at once as familiar as a classroom blackboard and as fleeting as a playground after a day’s play. For Oh, numbers are less symbolic than they are a fundamental language—absorbed into life and emotion, learned at birth, and used to record time and human relationships. They are not fixed symbols but an endlessly recurring “present tense.” The numbers on his canvases are not mere signs, but meditations on existence and time itself.

Portraits of Loss and Recovery

Another central body of work, his portraits, encapsulates profound humor and resonance within seemingly simple forms. Shadows of war and an unstable childhood surface in figures marked by missing eyes, noses, or ears. Yet these absences are counterbalanced by warm hues and healing objects that transform despair into innocence, wounds into renewal. Colors fade and weather, only to resurface in sudden brilliance, echoing both the fragility of memory and the enduring human narrative.

This interplay of loss and recovery is reflected in his working ethos as well. The fact that all his works are titled Untitled belongs to the same logic. “Most painters begin with a plan in mind and work toward a conclusion,” he explains. “I have never done that. The beginning and the end are always different—I never know where a work will end.” His paintings thus embrace unpredictability, resembling the “untitled masterpieces” children leave behind in playground sand at dusk.

Far from being a mere retrospective, this exhibition is a testament to an artist who has preserved the value of “purity” across decades of change, while illuminating new dimensions of a practice that continues to evolve.

Gallery Joeun
3, Itaewon-ro 55 ga-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
+82-2-790-5889

WEBSITE  Instagram  ARTSY