Born in Korea, Seng Yul Oh (1981) lives and works in New Zealand. His work combines elements found in East Asia's popular culture with ironic references to Western culture and Western art history. His works frequently explore concepts of scale and the space between spectacle and participation, across multiple media, including painting, installation, sculpture, video, or performance. Despite their formal lightness and playfulness, the works of Seung Yul Oh are, in their essence, serious reflections on cultural stereotypes create a silent commentary on the economy of the present.

The motive of a sizeable egg-shaped form introduced in Ode Pou, 2013, is a reoccurring subject in the artist's practice, and a reference to the cycle of life, to growth, regeneration, and cosmological forces. Like much of the work of Seng Yul Oh, the three giant fiberglass eggs in white, grey and sky blue are characteristic for their sleekness and somewhat minimal aesthetic. With its gaze firmly fixed on the sculpture of the three giant eggs, balancing against each other, a tiny mouse made in silver metal, generates a disproportionate relationship between its scale and social forces. By challenging our assumptions and belief system of the order of things, through the lightness of his humorous gestures, Oh aims to expand the spectator's expectations tied to the perception of time-space and materiality, in relation to reality.

MC