I came upon Gwon Osang's site because I wanted to look for photography used in three dimesional terms. Gwon Osang's background is actually in Sculpture and he was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. He has had many exhibitions, both solo and groups over the past 11 years all over the world, from Korea to the USA to Europe and Japan.
He has a series of work called Deodorant Type which are sculptures of mainly people ( there are other objects such as a dog and a van, etc.) doing various things from shopping to contortionism. He calls these sculptures "light" because they are made out of hundreds of little photos making a three dimensional being. He wanted to be able to move the sculptures around easily, stating that most sculpting materials are rather heavy and cumbersome to move.
At first, he made the sculptures of humans close to what the human body looked like and then started to gear towards more of a distorted form such as two-headed men. He worked on this particular series for about five years before he moved to another sculpture series dealing with still-life that still had photographs involved, but they were more simplistic than the Deodorant Type. There is an interview with him on his website where he compares photography to sculpturing, where you can reproduce photos from a negative like you produce a work of art in sculpture by making a model to use as a plaster mold. He talks about how he was at first interested in photography and then began a shift towards the art of sculpting more during the making of Deodorant Type. He pulled many of his ideas for images/sculptures from "contemporary images and advertisement" (as said by the interviewer Ju-hyeon Lee), which Gwon replied with that art circulates back and forth through advertisements and the artist.
Here is the website address: http://osang.net/works/deo.html
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Very good posting. This is interesting work. Especially in regard to the comments about art/reproduction. Remember Richard Prince who photographed advertisements? This brings the "art" into a discourse about commodity; how images are almost like a currency exchange. Very postmodern!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, especially that he was able to find a way for sculpture and photography to become incorporated together. He's doing it so literally as well- literally taking photos (not just an idea from a photo) and sculpting them.
ReplyDeleteI like that he started out making "normal" forms, then soon began to become more experimental with them, such as number 9 on the website. What caught my eye with this one is the man's right eye(s). Osang could have chosen to attach only one eye (what we would accept as being normal for humans), but he layered three eyes instead. I thought it made the face more interesting and abstract. Also, to go along with my most recent posting, these sculptures definitely display aspects of Cubism!