Oh ChiGyun "Defining Landscape"
The Chelsea Art Museum
This event has ended.
Recently there have been exhibitions that focused on painting in the U.S. and abroad that can be referred to not without a sense of irony as the return of "the return to painting." Although this is akin to Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" and no less tautological, these exhibitions inadvertently reiterated the "death of painting" polemic espoused in the 1980s by ideologically-vested critics. The arbiters of artistic taste who sounded the death knell during what was referred to in the U.S. as the "Reagan era," articulated their ominous observations in the wake of other theoretical endgames from both the political right and left, including, respectively, Francis Fukiyama's "end of history" and the poststructuralist "death of the author." Shifting away from nihilism and the fatalist foreclosure of "painting's demise," the recent exhibitions oriented around painting promised much by way of their titles. With catchy pronouncements such as "Painting: Division and Displacement" (2001), "Painting at the Edge of the World" (2001), and "Trouble Spot Painting" (2000), for example, these exhibitions attempted to take the medium to task, albeit that their analyses ultimately came short of their curatorial intentions. Other exhibitions such as "Painting as Paradox" (2002), however, investigated painting's influence by, and absorption of what has been fashionably called new media. Painting's tête-à-tête with a gamut of technologies including digitization, computer imaging, the Web, and video to name just a few, were the curatorial linchpins of the exhibition. But what happens when a painter makes a turn about face, so to speak; to the degree where her/his aesthetic cuts against the grain of contemporary trends and in doing so, broadens painting's discourse in unexpected ways, as is the case with the artist Oh Chi-Gyun?
— Raúl Zamudio
Media
Schedule
from May 29, 2008 to July 12, 2008