Korean artist Gwon Osang creates lifelike sculptures using photographs of his subjects, attached to mannequins. The result is a subversion of the utility of photographs as keepsakes of memory; Osang imagines an android like world in which the isolated images aggregate to form a whole that is, in its disrupted, fractured grammar, merely a warped sum of its imperfect parts. As collections of images, the photo-men and women of Osang’s sculptures at once present a multitude of perspectives, angles, colors, and approaches with which to approach the human body, and articulates the dreamlike breakdown that occurs when we do not sweep our loved ones into the visual shorthand of our binocular view.
I particularly like the sculptures that are unemotional, casual, and affectless. They have the grim, squeamish, pixelated demeanor of a Sims character. The horror of The Sims, to me, comes from its morbid boredom and routine. It is the sense that these dumb, blocky sculptures have grasped a basic idea that underpins human existence: that of routine, and mindnumbing boredom.
Osang’s sculptures express our inability to comprehend that we contain multitudes, that we are also creatures of light, that our bodies extend in angles and break into fractals. Even his mutant-bodies, with two heads, small heads, and duck heads, seem strangely accurate and proportional. It is hard to put the same visual boundaries and apply the same laws to creatures composed of light as it is to creatures of flesh and blood.
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