Chris Oh: Passage

Humans look into the past for knowledge to understand the present, which will ultimately inspire ideas for the future. Discovering and learning from archaeological sites, museums, publications, artifacts, and the natural world have allowed humans to realize the transience of being and their relationships to the various modalities of time found in nature. As much as such revelations compel some to wonder what will remain once they cease to exist, others beg the question, how would systems of knowledge accumulated in a person’s lifetime, along with what their ancestors have accrued, be relayed to future generations? Driven by both questions, Chris Oh’s first solo exhibition, Passage, at Capsule Shanghai, as suggested in the double-entendre of its title, showcases painted objects as relics of the future.

Recognized for his exceptional painterly ability honed at a young age, Chris Oh could replicate any image into an astounding facsimile. Notions of appropriation and authorship may have contended in the visual realm from antiquity to the present day, copying as a form of learning has not only been common practice among artists’ studios of the Renaissance Masters such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, but the burgeoning art and culture of this period itself, was rooted in rediscovering and learning from the classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Instead of marveling at the lofty idealizations of the beauty of the Italian Renaissance, Oh, however, opted for the Northern Renaissance period. With subjects ranging from landscape, portraiture, still life, and biblical narrative to rural labor from this period, Northern Renaissance artists retained a Gothic sensibility carried over from illuminated manuscripts, where somber moods and darker psychological undertones resonate with the intent and effects Oh envisioned for this body of work. What also appealed to Oh is the attention to detail shown in paintings from this period, before the wide use of lens and photography, which looked exceptionally fresh to Oh with an uncanny beauty, a change he hoped to pursue while departing from his previous photo-realist approach.

Oh’s covetous act of painting details of Northern Renaissance images onto artificial and natural objects, driven by a fascination with the natural world and knowledge systems, asserts the artist’s revelation that humans have always co-existed with objects of varied temporalities. Viewers of this exhibition will come across a sea fan, a cicada, an emu egg, shells, agate slices, and burl slabs, among others; each matter represents a unique life cycle, spanning from days to eons. “For this exhibition at Capsule Shanghai, I want to use materials that grew over time.” Moreover, the compositions of Northern Renaissance paintings, which often relied on a central axis, fit into the geometry of modern objects Oh found, showing the artist that conventions of composition from hundreds of years ago bleed into our contemporary sphere of culture now.

Oh’s work process is similar to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. He often begins by studying the etymology of his subjects and their symbolic potentials in making free imaginative associations, which became cues that connected these subjects with his abundantly versed art historical lexicons in Northern Renaissance paintings. Among the works on view, one will find glimpses of masterpieces by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, and the lesser-known works of Dieric Bouts, Gerard David, and Rogier van der Weyden.

Much like the work process Oh has adopted for rendering each piece in this show, the overall conception for this exhibition would also allow viewers to make free association presented from one gallery space to the other. Although the specific theme designed for each gallery space takes the viewer on a journey through mourning, knowledge and wisdom, unifying transformation, melancholy, and depth of consciousness – a course that spans a person’s life, Oh’s juxtaposition of the various perceptions and experiences of time tempers with the illusory nature of the imagery.

As one peruses through the gallery spaces, grasping glimpses from the ideal beauty in the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci on a perforated sea fan to the tree on the back of a statue that recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters to detail from Dieric Bouts’ workshop Virgin and Child (after 1454) painted on a cicada, emerges from a clutch of eggs that lie in a nest, held by a metal holder adorned with flowers, and finally reaches the last gallery of the exhibition. There, surrounded by details of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Months of the Year cycle painted on burl slabs, the central piece Bud (2023), where the detail of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights depicting nudes within a transparent sphere, which is the fruit of a plant, would allow one to connect the dots through their symbolic registers, that all the sentient beings exist on earth can relate to notions of the celestial realm and the underworld, finding the lasting beauty that exists in between.

-Fiona He