LOS ANGELES, CA.- Stroll Garden is showing “Elegies,” a two-part solo exhibition of Korean-American artist Se Oh. Featuring over seventy new porcelain sculptures punctuated with multi-sensory and ritualistic performances, this compelling narrative exhibition explores the intimate relationships and histories that can be drawn between senses, mediums, ceremonies, and spiritual lineages. “Elegies (Little Deaths / The Witnesses)” will mark Stroll Garden’s first collaboration with Se Oh and will showcase the most ambitious and experiential showings of the artist's practice to date.
Adopted from South Korea in 1984 and raised in West Tennessee, Oh focuses on the liminality of their identity as an adopted Korean-American who assimilated into American culture at a very young age. “I grew up in a conservative Christian home, where there are definitive lines drawn between what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’,” says Oh. “As I grew up and found my agency as a queer kid, my prescribed Christian values began to align with me less and less. I quickly abandoned the need for a higher power’s love and validation, for my fate was set in stone according to the belief systems I was raised in. My relationship with death began with my parents mourning my eternal life. You could feel the anxiety they carried for the ‘choice’ I had made. As a gay man, I would never be admitted into the gates of heaven. From the moment they realized my truth, the fear held for their child was palpable. This triggered me to kill many parts of myself in order to survive as a queer adoptee, transplanted into not only American Southern culture, but also living within the ‘Bible Belt’. By the time I reached my early twenties, I was a master at killing the parts of myself that didn’t serve me. This skill was born from necessity in my adolescence, but later, had transformed into a tool I still use to this day. A tool to clear out what doesn’t serve me to make room for new. Whether it be habits, relationships, ideologies, my ability to experience death and rebirth in this waking life has and will always be my greatest achievement.”
Divided in two distinct chapters, “Elegies” aims to create a space where people can come and reflect on the inevitable cycle we are all part of, a brief moment to simultaneously embrace death with one arm and welcome rebirth with the other.
Chapter I: Little Deaths
January 20, 2024
The exhibition’s first chapter will unveil over sixty hand-thrown porcelain vessels lining the gallery walls. Each vessel, based on Korean burial ceramics, represents a specific touch point in one’s life where something is replaced or evolves. Viewers will be invited to write down on incense paper a “little death” they have experienced, then will light it and place it in a hand-painted vessel created by the artist as they enter the gallery. The incense paper, created for this exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Hyungi Park, is made with Korean Hanji paper from mulberry bark and soaked in fragrances of chrysanthemum, a flower traditionally associated with Korean funerals. Oh states: “We all experience little deaths whether we know it or not. It’s the cycle of all things, and no matter how hard we try, we will never be immune to this cyclical motion. Like the gravity that holds us to the ground, or the current of air that pushes through this fragile vessel, the cycle of all matter is a natural phenomenon.”
Chapter II: The Witnesses
February 28, 3—6pm
The second chapter will be marked by the arrival of “The Witnesses” – a series of new large-scale, celadon porcelain sculptures – during the week of Frieze Los Angeles. Inspired by the visual language of angels from the Old Testament of the Bible, these “Witnesses” keep watchful eyes on the viewer as they reflect on their own “little deaths.” Oh describes these figures: “These objects were not created to protect, rather to simply observe the space and energy it interacts with.”
“Elegies” will be on view at Stroll Garden from January 20 through March 30, 2024.
SE OH is an artist and ceramicist based in Los Angeles. Their work is influenced by traditional Korean ceramic techniques and glazes (Shinos and Celadons) combined with altered forms that emulate textures found in nature. Their raw sculptures – made with white porcelain developed in the United States and often dressed in glazes from Korea – represent ghosts of lost identities and the duality of the two countries they are suspended between. Oh has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Half Gallery (Los Angeles) and One Trick Pony Gallery (Los Angeles), and their work has been featured in group exhibitions at Kasmin Gallery (New York), Phillips Auction House (Seoul, South Korea), The Ranch (Montauk, NY), The Something Machine (Bellport, NY), La Beast Gallery (Los Angeles), among others.
Stroll Garden
Se Oh: Elegies (Little Deaths / The Witnesses)
January 20 – March 30, 2024
