Artist Talk: Min Oh
Film Still, Min Oh, Polyphony of Polyphony, Time-based installation, 2021
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of hosting an artist talk at Enseoul Gallery with Min Oh, whose multidisciplinary practice spans performance, film, sound, and theory.
Min Oh explores the languages of time-based media. Influenced by her early training in piano performance and later studies in graphic design, her work converges across multidisciplinary genres, where time, body, and structural thought intersect. Initially focused on the intrinsic differences between time-based genres in language and production throughout history, her practice has evolved into a metacognitive inquiry into the political realities embedded within them. Scrutinizing conventions, her film-installation and performance works construct eccentric substructures by superposing elements across genres, mediums, and processes. These substructures function as political apparatuses, redistributing dynamics between predominant and marginalized constituents.
We delved into her ambitious ongoing project Simultaneity - a rich inquiry into structure, perception, and political sensation.
Simultaneity Publication, Interior page image
Simultaneity was conceived as a language essential to our contemporary era, where heightened sensitivity to diversity - across culture, gender, and ethnicity, is increasingly demanded. It particularly engages with the implicit hierarchical realities and political dynamics that manifest both on the surface and beneath artworks. Despite numerous historical artistic efforts to counteract traditional hierarchies, the artist often encounters latent social strata within the ecosystem of art, not necessarily within the human dimension, but in the relationships among non-human artistic components, such as content and form; thought and sensation; process and outcome; or text and image.
“If the notion of ‘purification,’ as posited by Latour, is at work within non-human art components, even if subtly, critical scrutiny of it may be urgent. Just as non-human entities increasingly influence human life today, hierarchies among non-human artistic components will inevitably shape the human world as well.”
Simultaneity intrinsically fosters hybridity. From a broader perspective, Simultaneity not only embodies physical concurrency and contiguity but also traverses divergent temporal or conceptual spaces through citation and dépaysement: connecting, disrupting, misreading, recasting, and reenacting memories, experiences, and knowledge.
It instigates erratic motion by conceptually and practically bringing heterogeneous elements into proximity, drawing on a latent homogeneity - an inherent yet obscured commonality that, in turn, drives a continuous state of becoming. These sensations, dispersed without a center, may seem chaotic or disordered, yet they already constitute the very fabric of our daily lives. Everyday contemporaries, who consume vast amounts of information per second by pressing remote control buttons, clicking hyperlinks, or swiping through images, are already unconsciously articulating this intricate simultaneous-hybrid sensation language.
“From a more concrete artistic perspective, Simultaneity deconstructs, reorganizes, and redistributes heterogeneous disciplines, media, roles, processes, time, and spaces within a single work, drawing on a liminal homogeneity, evoking an understated Hybridity.”
Installation View, Min Oh, Polyphony of Polyphony, Time-based installation, 2021
The artwork Simultaneity is a series that comprises time-based installations, including Interview, Conference, Portrait, and Performance. The series takes Performance as its starting point, which investigates the notion of Filming as Dance. It choreographs a sequence of technical actions, to be executed along with various filming and sound recording devices and techniques often used in action movie production - walking, running, handheld shooting, skateboarding, gimbals, steadicams, dollies, cranes, microphones, and lighting. The choreography is performed live with the invited audience, who are entitled to perform ‘structural listening,’ a concept posited by Theodor Adorno, thus integrating them into the filmmaking team and constructing a conceptual plane in which everyone collectively works toward the shared goal of film production. The recorded images and sounds from the performance will be completed as a time-based imagery-acoustic installation.
Heterophony of Heterochrony, Installation view of 2021 KOREA ARTIST PRIZE, MMCA, Seoul (© MMCA / Hong Cheolki Photography)
“Music cannot truly exist without a listener. Whether noticed or not, listening involves technique. The technique of listening encompasses recognizing and memorizing what is heard, which corporealizes music: When you recognize the pulse, you can engage with the rhythm and immerse your body in it; when you recall a thematic melody, you can sing or hum it. Listening involves transforming the abstract into the bodily.”
Installation View, Min Oh, 412356 Prototype, Time-based installation, 2020
In addition, the series transforms the research process behind Performance e.g., conversations with film technicians, discussions on multidisciplinary collaboration, and technical studies on filming equipment - into independent artworks: Interview, Conference, and Portrait. Originally conceived as pre-production in the realm of filmmaking or as rehearsals in the realm of dance, these works manifest themselves as études (a musical genre that evolved from technical exercises into concert pieces, largely through Chopin’s contribution).
Building upon the inherent hybridity of Performance, which superimposes live performance onto the filming process, the whole series further deepens this multi-layered complexity by bringing the invisible processes concealed in the production to the surface and redistributing them onto the surface as artworks. Spoken and written language, which frequently appear in these works as an inherent aspect of research, is conceived as sensory material, like sound or image, rather than as text for immediate and effective communication.
All these works are conceived on the premise that excerpts from each part will be montaged into one feature-length documentary film.
Film Still, Min Oh, Polyphony of Polyphony, Time-based installation, 2021
“I recall feeling insecure when stepping on stage, sensing that I hadn’t yet achieved perfection. Whenever this happened, I would joke that I was practicing on stage. However, perfection might, after all, be a mirage that no one can truly attain. Interestingly, there is a musical genre that superposes rehearsal and performance. Études refer to short pieces originally composed to hone a specific technique for performing; however, since Chopin, they have evolved into popular concert pieces. When an étude is performed on stage, it theoretically enacts both practice and performance, manifesting that the essence of performance could be fundamentally about “becoming.”
From choreographing film crews to reimagining musical concepts like "sound mass," Min's work unsettles hierarchies and invites us to listen, look, and think differently.
Thank you to everyone who joined for the screening, conversation, and unfolding of this evolving body of work, set to culminate in 2026 at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art.