ARTISTS

Kai Oh

Guest Curatorial Program (2025)

Through Fragility

Kai Oh (b. 1992, Seoul) focuses on expanding the boundaries of photography, capturing the
non-human-centric life force in urban spaces through her lens. She places particular emphasis on
the fluidity of digital images, exploring their inherent possibilities. Subtle reflections of her cultural
background and lived experience as a Korean woman inform her sensitivity to structure, control,
and the aesthetics of order. By bringing digital images from the computer into physical space, Oh
challenges conventional norms and historical values linked to flat images/surfaces on the wall,
crafting otherworldly scenarios.
Oh holds her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and BA from Seoul National
University and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. Her solo exhibitions include Will You Marry
Me? (2025) at Subtitled NYC, Half Sticky (2023) at the Industrial Bank of Korea, and Softsharp
(2021) at Cylinder in Seoul. She has also been featured in group exhibitions such as GNADE at BBK
Künstlerhaus München (2023), The Postmodern Child Part 2 at the Busan Museum of
Contemporary Art (2023), Rales, Wheezes and Crackles at Doosan Gallery, Seoul (2022), Super-fine
at Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul (2021), and Foam Talent at Foam Amsterdam (2017).

In this exhibition, Through Fragility, both artists present new work using glass, a delicate material that carries the
dual qualities of transparency and protection, rupture and connection. Specifically, Oh examines
the systemic vulnerabilities of human perception, easily affected by algorithmic mediation, while
Lee engages with fragility as an ontological inevitability shaped by grief and memory.
Oh uses glass not only to support photographs but as an integral part of the image itself. She
captures everyday scenes with her smartphone and manipulates them to introduce depth and
movement. Her surreal compositions reflect on clarity and limitation. In her Double Glass Series
(2024), Oh combines shattered glass with printed images to question the authenticity and
completeness of digital media.

Her new work Vulnerable and Naked (2025) explores uniquely human modes of tactile, emotional,
and sensory experiences that have been increasingly eroded under the influence of AI algorithms.
Employing her primary method of photo collage, she shapes familiar patterns and dismantles
them, drawing attention to homogenized images and perceptual systems within algorithmic
structures. At the same time, she overlays pencil drawings onto digital images, imbuing the work
with the tactile presence of the hand while introducing a sense of speed and dimensionality. In the
process, concrete forms become abstracted and disparate sensations traverse the boundary
between mass and the individual image. Through this, Oh fractures the biases by the system and
gestures toward the possibility of being as a subject who thinks, senses, and creates within it.