daehak Oh

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I have spent my life dipping a toe into things. Film, music, games, painting — I entered many, finished none. Painting is the first thing I want to see through to the end. So I treat painting as a practice. With materials my body learned in Korea, I hold myself steady in a foreign place. I grind ink. I press the hardened stick against the inkstone and grind it with water, hundreds of times, until the black pours out. With that black I wet the wooden panel and build a ground. Over it I lay hanji, sheet by sheet, pour shellac, and scrape it back. Pouring and scraping, thousands of times. Some areas soak through and become one with the panel; others fall away for good. From making the material to raising the surface, I hold a restless mind still inside that long repetition. I do not change my materials. Always hanji, ink, and shellac; always the same repetition. Within that, I raise a different form each time. Sometimes a surface with no image at all, sometimes the iconography of an old painting, sometimes a construction built from stacked fragments. These are not stages, one finished before the next begins — they are different faces of the same practice. What stays constant is the material and the act; what changes is the form that rises from them. Not everything we live through stays with us. What we tried to hold fades; what we barely noticed sometimes remains. Everyone carries a buried place — if only I had gone the other way. We live with it unresolved, like a task we...

Artwork