Gwon Osang, who majored in sculpture, has built his artistic practice by exploring methods of dealing with both flatness and three-dimensionality, beginning with photographic sculptures that materialize photographic images into sculptural form and subvert the traditions of sculpture. This can be seen in his ‘Deodorant Type’ series, which he has been developing since his undergraduate years in 1998. In this body of work, he collides and rearranges the interrelated elements of weight, volume, and surface image within the sculptural medium by reconstructing images he directly photographs into three-dimensional forms.
 
Subsequently, the artist selected flat images represented as objects that most effectively reveal value through advertising photography and reconfigured them, creating the ‘The Flat’ series, which encompasses shallow spatiality formed by overlapping fragmented images. He has also produced the ‘Sculpture’ series, which recreates structural elements such as motorcycle parts (‘Torso’) and automobiles like ‘Lamborghini,’ thereby amplifying the aura of traditional sculpture through direct reconstruction.

His more recent series, ‘Relief’ and ‘New Structure,’ demonstrate a method in which the reconfiguration of images he has long engaged with becomes more actively operative within space. In particular, the relief format emphasized in the exhibition 《Relief Relief》 utilizes selected flat images as they are, while constructing structural forms that maintain their planar characteristics, thereby acquiring spatial qualities in a new way.

The ‘Relief’ series presented in this exhibition represents a full-scale presentation of the relief works previously introduced in his early 2016 solo exhibition. The images used in this series are sourced from the international magazine ‘Wallpaper*,’ which the artist regards as an archive of the most plausible objects produced each month by human hands across the globe. Through the scale, form, and color of the selected images, arranged through the artist’s intuitive composition, one can observe his methodology in which the flatness of images corresponds to the sculptural format of relief.
 
The exhibition also presents one work from the ‘New Structure’ series, which began in 2014 and directly adopts Calder’s stabile structure. This series constructs three-dimensional structures using selected object images from the ‘The Flat’ series, and it is expected to reveal connections with the relief works that are a central focus of this exhibition.

References

• 《Relief Relief》