Oh Sufan
Korea
Oh Sufan (b.1946) invites us to a novel aspect of nature through his method of drawing, which portrays appearances of nature we had never thought of or recognized. The Gokshin (God of Valley ) series was his earliest representative work until the mid-1990s. The term Gokshin comes from the phrase Gokshin bulsa, which translates as“the Gokshin never dies.” This can be interpreted simply as“in nature the human spirit never disappears”and can be linked to the Taoist concept of “inactivity.” Hence, his work reveals elements of East Asian philosophy, but he does not want his works to be understood on this basis alone. The theories he adopted were merely applied to his works to share Eastern sentiments and tastes. On the one hand, Oh’s paintings remind us of Western Modernism because they resemble European Art Informel in that paint is applied very thickly to reveal its texture, and the entire picture plane consists of color fields. Thus, his paintings are always circulating, like Laozi’s concept of“non-dong,”coming and going between East and West, universal sentiment and new experience. Ultimately, Oh’s abstract drawings are a world of “inactivity,”continued without end over four decades.