GWON Osang

Sculpture in Contemporary Art is expanding its importance as a genre by infinitely broadening its form and content through incorporating with other genres like painting, video and photography. Combining attributes of sculpture and photography in one work, Osang Gwon(b. 1974, Korea)’s works are a concise statement on the multiple functions of images and information that flood the modern society, as well as the hybridism of and competition between the different genres in contemporary art.
In Deodorant Type series, hundreds of photographs of the subject are glued onto the form made of light material like Styrofoam. The unusual combi-nation of 3-D sculptures and 2-D photographs densely clustered on the surface of the form distort and repeat the image of the subjects, reconstructing the viewer’s perception of the subject. Another series, The Sculpture, takes images of cars and motorbikes like Lamborghini or Ducati from internet and magazines, makes an actual model from which the artist creates the sculptural form with traditional sculptural material like bronze or clay. The smooth artificial surface of the real product is substituted with the traditional sculptural touch or the the painterly brush strokes. Through this process, The Sculpture series takes the most modern object as the subject for traditional sculpture, creating work that resembles the actual object as closely as possible, yet remaining a piece of sculpture. Information and images produced uniformly and homogeneously through contemporary society’s media overpowers the personal experience of the individual. Gwon’s works focus on these visual elements that come from such homogenous source. In particular, The Flat series use the mass media images in a more direct manner. The artist cuts out all kinds of images printed in a magazine, fixes them on wire to stand erect on a horizontal surface, then photographs them to assemble the cut-outs in one surface. Passing through the process from the flat photograph to sculpture, then back to photograph, the work situates itself between the boundaries of 3-dimensional and flat, and the actual object and its image.
arario gallery

GWON OSang
Born in    1974, Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
2004    M.F.A in Sculpture, HongIk University, Seoul, Korea
2000    B.F.A in Sculpture, HongIk University, Seoul, Korea
    
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2014    KH Vatec, Seoul (upcoming)
             Osang Gwon: JOYCE PARIS, Paris, France
             Osang Gwon: The Deodorant Type, Statoil art programme, Statoil,
             Bærum, Norway
2013    Temenggong Artist in Residency, Singapore
             Postmodern Times, HADA Contemporary, London, UK
             Masspatterns, 13 S/S Collaboration Exhibition #03,
             MANMADE WOOYOUNGMI, Seoul, Korea
2012    ARARIO GALLERY, Seoul Cheongdam, Korea
2011    Adore, Aando Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany
2009    Doosan Gallery, New York, USA
2008    Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2014    Busan Biennale, Busan, Korea (upcoming)
             K ? pop : Korean Contemporary Art, Taipei MoCA, Taipei
2013    The Public’s extended, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, Korea
2012    Jin Tong, Contemporary Korean Art since the 1990s,
             Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju, Korea
2011    Collector’s Stage, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
2010    Memories of Future, Leeum, Seoul, Korea
             Korean Eye: Fantastic Ordinary, Saatchi gallery, London, UK ;
             The Arts House, Singapore ;
             Roundabout Collection, City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, UK
             On the Cutting Edge – Aspects of Korean Contemporary
             Photography, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung