In an era where anything goes, where even a ready-made car submitted to an art gallery is perceived as Art, Gwon presents us with a sculpture of a ‘super car’ in bronze. Gwon is known for his simple and lighthearted works, which often seemed to mock the seriousness of Sculpture, but here, has chosen to utilize the most traditional of techniques and the most conventional of all possible materials used in sculpture.

Sculpture, alongside painting, has maintained its central influence in both Eastern and Western Art throughout history. Sculpture and painting have each given away its position of historical importance to the other at different times and have gone through periods of turmoil in which their status as Art were in question. However, in the midst of all the discourses surrounding Art, sculpture and painting have always remained at the core.

Even in mid 20th-Century, when artists began to challenge the boundaries between genres of artistic media, fragmentarily appropriating from various genres and hybridizing media, there were always the few who insisted upon carrying on the tradition of Sculpture.

Despite the times, however, being pushed off to the sidelines by the currency of the new media, sculpture was still alive and well. The fact that Gwon, Osang was one of those few artists who carried on this tradition of Sculpture almost seemed to be a secret kept from the public until “The Sculpture” was presented. In 1998, when Gwon, Osang presented the Deodorant Type, in which he composed a human body using photographic fragments, critics viewed his work as a contemporary piece with a sophisticated sensibility. Gwon had publicly announced that his piece was simply a sculpture and yet, critics chose to tag Deodorant Type a ‘three-dimensional work using photography’ rather than a sculpture. Five years later, when Gwon framed a photograph inside a shiny diasec frame in The Flat, critics said that Gwon had finally entered the field of photography as of his achievements made in that piece. However, Gwon once again declared The Flat a sculpture, as was Deodorant Type, and in his own logic, considered both pieces the ultimate perfection of Sculpture.

The story of artist Gwon, Osang and his relationship to sculpture begins with his photography sculptures. Not only was Gwon, Osang physically too frail to pursue traditional sculpture, what with all the chiseling and trimming of stones, sculpting of clay and casting into bronze, he was also too sensible to do it against all the contemporary forces against it.

He began instead to seek an appropriately modern material to substitute the traditional materials of sculpture. The new material would hopefully free him from the weight of tradition as well as the strenuous process of production. In the end, he found a link between photography and sculpture and with it, discovered a contemporary visual angle all the while drawing attention to the fragmentary properties of the visual field.

From the modern gaze of Charles Pierre-Baudelaire to the simulacra of Jean Baudrillard, the photographic media rule over the modern city as the primary force underlying all visual concepts. Photography embodies the will to arrest the transient moment in time which has in turn, made it the very media to completely transform our conception of the visual field with its capability to separate image from reality.

If Gwon Osang’s Deodorant Type is considered a contemporary work of art because of its photographic properties, the reproductive properties of this work give it the possibility to transition into a sculpture. Gwon, Osang has explained his position on the mechanisms of photography and sculpture as follows: “In sculpture, we sculpt an object and cast it into plaster which is no different from the process of developing negatives in film. Also, the process of re-making the original object from the plaster cast is parallel to the printing process in photography.” Gwon insightfully addresses the three-part mechanism of ‘original-cast-reproduction’ utilized in all analog reproductions including photography.

This alternative approach to the reproductive nature of photography and sculpture provides a means to refute against the critics of Deodorant Type who have tagged the reproducibility of this work as being a result of a lazy sculptor’s poor artistic execution. If we could presume that the starting point for all visual arts such as sculpture, painting as well as photography is in the reproduction and mimesis of nature and object, we could also say that to substitute a sculptor’s representative process with the photographer’s reproductive process is nothing short of being a necessary creative unification. Beyond the overlapping areas of technique and meaning between photography and sculpture, what Gwon has presented with Deodorant Type was the possibility of a new sculpture which is befitting of our time.

Gwon created a new genre of sculpture in Deodorant Type called photography sculpture and does so again in The Flat creating the genre of still-life sculptures. Here, he collects popular items which appear in magazine ads such as watches, jewelry, cosmetics, shoes and purses as objects in his sculpture. The frequency with which these objects are found in magazines alone reflects appropriateness of Gwon’s use of these icons inundating today’s consumer-oriented culture.

With such objects, Gwon, Osang simplifies the sculptural process to the bare minimum. Gwon is said to have replaced the heaviness of sculpture with lightness, the volume and density with fragility through his photography sculptures, but here in The Flat, he further infuses the complex sculptural process with simplicity. Using cutouts from magazines each attached to a piece of iron wire, Gwon grants a three-dimensional structure made of flat sheets of paper the status of Sculpture.

Another interesting fact is that Gwon ultimately shows us this simplified sculpture in a two-dimensional photograph, and still insists that The Flat is a sculpture. Considering The Flat a sculpture then, is an effort which requires a much more complicated approach to reasoning about the properties of sculpture than does considering Deodorant Type a sculpture. One of the most characteristic properties of traditional sculpture would be the three-dimensionality of the object being represented.

The object represented in Gwon’s The Flat, however, while having the benefit of being a three-dimensional structure, cannot escape the fact that they are essentially made of two-dimensional photographs, which can only be viewed from one perspective at a time. The human eye, in reality, is unable to truly view an object straight ahead from one perspective because of its tendency to recognize spatial relations, automatically recognizing the lateral surfaces of an object and imagining its backside.

The one-eyed camera lens, on the other hand, which only detects spatiality by the appearance of an object’s size, is capable of representing an object from a truly two-dimensional plane as Gwon intended in this planar sculpture. In other words, the sculpture made of two-dimensional pieces reaches its perfection as intended by the artist only when it is framed inside a camera and it is only in such a state that it can exist as a solid sculpture.

The shiny, solid images included in The Flat which vividly float before our eyes are veiled in layers of media, remotely far from what we see. In fact, the objects indexed in these photographs are nameless, mass-produced objects which in turn, have been photographed, and from which the film was processed and developed only to become mass re-produced in magazine format, which was then framed by the artist’s camera and cast into a sculpture, finally reaching the image that we see before us. These objects whose authenticity are no longer even believable, as are so many things in our world today, create an aura of authenticity in this sculpture that is even more believable than that of the magazine presentations of the objects.

Gwon has experimented with the possibilities inherent in planar sculptures through The Flat and here has mastered the study of images by going beyond the relationships between the visual, illusory, reality and images, and exploring instead the relationships between images and other images.

Following his photography sculpture and planar sculptures, Gwon, Osang has created a bronze ‘super car’ in an era where even ready-made automobiles displayed in galleries are considered Art.

Gwon, Osang, the artist who always limited his work to light and simple projects, who often seemed to be mocking traditional sculpture, has in fact chosen the most traditional of techniques and the most conventional of materials from the sculptural tradition for this project. Gwon, Osang insists that he was simply trying to present a sculpture, but the gigantic bronze cast of the ‘super car,’ Murcielago somehow does not touch the audience as would a Greek sculpture with precious simplicity and quiet greatness’ as J.J. Winckelmann has described in the past.

From such an artist of cold reason as Gwon, Osang, to expect such an impressionable and emotional response from his work, especially in the context of the today’s fragmented and mentally dispersed societies, would be laughable. In fact, Gwon’s ‘super car’ with its dark orange thickly laid out across, occupying the entire surrounding space is less an emotionally moving experience than it is an overwhelming and bewildering one.

This reaction might be compared to an experienced painter’s discovery of a new shade of color or perhaps an experienced sculptor’s particular use of density, or the shock of finding a sculpture so low and spread out across the floor. However, the audience’s overwhelming sensation, as well as the bewildering one, is really originating from a psychological place.

It is almost an electrical sensation that is felt upon finding oneself face to face with something one had always subconsciously desired but never imagined the desire to materialize. It is also a sense of the times and of history one experiences upon facing a piece of work that seems to belong to exactly that moment in time.

On his work, “The Sculpture”, Gwon, Osang has said that there is nothing more to the piece than that it is simply a ‘super car’ in bronze. However, through this essay, I want to add that Gwon’s new series of works is the product of his ceaseless study of sculpture, materialized with a contemporary sensibility.

Aside from “The Sculpture,” seeing Gwon’s new pieces in the Deodorant Type and The Flat series, I cannot help but see the denser and harder figures emerging and emphasize their sculpture-ness. Perhaps that has more to do with clearing up the misconceptions surrounding Gwon, Osang’s artistic identity, but more than that, it is because I am beginning to see the ways Gwon’s study of sculpture and modernity through photography can begin to answer some of the questions concerning contemporary sculpture and how sculptures today can move audiences using its very sculptural properties.

In Gwon’s works, I sense a new day on the horizon for sculpture. Just as contemporary painting found a link between traditional techniques and modern subjects leading to the ‘triumph of painting’, sculpture too has taken a step toward just that in Gwon, Osang’s works. The return of Sculpture has just begun.