Kai Oh '24 Unveils New Solo Exhibition: 'Will You Marry Me?'
Visual Arts alum Kai Oh '24 opened her solo exhibition Will You Marry Me? on February 15, 2025 at Subtitled NYC, a gallery that foregrounds interdisciplinarity and collaborative practices between artists and curators.
This is an ideal venue for Oh’s work, which has long engaged with the materiality of photographic images as well as the surfaces and frames we use to reinforce them. Her "images" become spatial, melting off the gallery wall and emerging, sculpturally, from the floor. In this exhibition, she expands upon this practice through her inclusion of hand-painted elements and natural materials like silk and soil, which parallel her practice of digital collage through their fluidity and mutability.
However, Oh’s attention to materiality exceeds medium. This current show marries (if you will) formal and thematic concerns; within the object Oh makes of photography, she objectifies her own body. In Will You Marry Me?, fragmented images of Oh’s breasts and nipples (particularly scrutinized, yet hyper-visible parts of the body) are collaged with natural imagery, everyday items, and decontextualized symbols of femininity.
"This act of both fragmentation and reconstruction—literal and conceptual—highlights the absurdity of societal constructs," said curator Ho Won Kim.
Oh’s impulse to play with and subvert societal and artistic conventions is deeply informed by her identity as a Korean woman and her experiences growing up within a society that emphasizes perfection and conformity. By flattening her own body into an element of surreal composition, Oh draws attention to the violence and absurdity of the persistent sexualization of Asian women’s bodies within and beyond Korean society.
"Living in regions like Korea, Germany, and the U.S. has given me the chance to experience firsthand how concepts like freedom, diversity, and identity are not universally fixed but are shaped by different cultural contexts and environments… Rather than emphasizing my roots or personal background, I prioritize an open approach, observing phenomena with flexibility regardless of where I am," Oh said in a November 2024 interview with The Here and There Collective.
Born in Seoul and based in New York, Oh has traveled the path of the international artist, studying in Nuremberg and New York and exhibiting at the Industrial Bank of Korea, Seoul; BBK Künstlerhaus München, Germany; Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan; Rainrain Gallery, New York; and Foam Amsterdam, Netherlands, among others.
Will You Marry Me? is on view until March 23, 2025 at Subtitled NYC’s Franklin St. space in Brooklyn, NY.
Oh’s impulse to play with and subvert societal and artistic conventions is deeply informed by her identity as a Korean woman and her experiences growing up within a society that emphasizes perfection and conformity. By flattening her own body into an element of surreal composition, Oh draws attention to the violence and absurdity of the persistent sexualization of Asian women’s bodies within and beyond Korean society.
"Living in regions like Korea, Germany, and the U.S. has given me the chance to experience firsthand how concepts like freedom, diversity, and identity are not universally fixed but are shaped by different cultural contexts and environments… Rather than emphasizing my roots or personal background, I prioritize an open approach, observing phenomena with flexibility regardless of where I am," Oh said in a November 2024 interview with The Here and There Collective.
Born in Seoul and based in New York, Oh has traveled the path of the international artist, studying in Nuremberg and New York and exhibiting at the Industrial Bank of Korea, Seoul; BBK Künstlerhaus München, Germany; Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan; Rainrain Gallery, New York; and Foam Amsterdam, Netherlands, among others.
Will You Marry Me? is on view until March 23, 2025 at Subtitled NYC’s Franklin St. space in Brooklyn, NY.