“Elephant in swing” Installation view at Duson Gallery ©Duson GalleryDuson Gallery presents “Elephant in swing,” a solo exhibition by artist Oum Jeongsoon, on view through March 16. The exhibition features more than 60 works, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures, in which the artist explores the question of ‘what it means to see’ through the metaphor of an elephant.
The artist finds the answer to the fundamental question of ‘seeing’ in the parable of the elephant. The fable of ‘the blind men and an elephant’ and the historical event of the first elephant to enter the Korean peninsula are the main narratives of her works, and she also reflects on our prejudice against the elephant as a foreign creature, the largest animal on earth. Elephant without trunk (2022), which embraces the appearance of ‘difference’, was selected for the Park Seo-bo Art Prize at the 2023 Gwangju Biennale. Through this work, Oum shared the social meaning of deficiency and presented new insights.
“Elephant in swing” is an exhibition in which the artist connects two narratives about elephants to visualize the concept of time, in which different spatial and temporal moments coexist and influence each other. Penetrating the image of time is ‘swaying’, which blurs or omits the elephants, birds, and photographic landscapes in the work, giving them a different appearance. The representation of shaking shows the changing nature of existence, as ‘what moves is alive’, which means an attempt to find a new meaning or identity for the object.
Oum Jeongsoon (b. 1961) graduated from Ewha Womans University College of Fine Arts, Department of Western Painting, and the Graduate School of Painting at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Oum has retraced the long journey of an elephant that had first arrived in Korea about 600 years ago, departing from Indonesia via Japan, and finally being exiled in Jangdo island, located at the end of South Jeolla. Oum held solo exhibitions at Hakgojae Gallery (Seoul, 2003), Akira Ikeda Gallery (Nagoya, Japan, 1997) etc., and participated various group exhibitions including the 14th Gwangju biennale (Gwangju, Korea, 2023), “Afforable Art Fair” (DDP, Seoul, 2016), “Unfolding the Folds of Elephant” (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2015). Oum was selected as for the Park Seo-bo Art Prize at the 2023 Gwangju Biennale. And her works are collected by lots of museums including National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, National Folk Museum of Korea, Samsung Foundation of Culture.
