Hein-kuhn Oh, Da-won Kang, Age 19, August 13, 2007, 2007

Miki Wick Kim Contemporary Art is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Hein-kuhn Oh in Europe.

Although they are large scale close ups, Hein-kuhn Oh’s photographs of teenage girls avoid the expected intimacy of portraiture and instead present a distanced look at the physical, yet deeply symbolic similarities between the members of this group. Taken as a whole, Cosmetic Girls is a body of work that presents a certain type of social convention: conformity of appearance through unwritten but strictly adhered to codes of make-up and style. The rules these girls maintain amongst themselves are influenced more than ever by mass media such as television, and less than ever by tradition. In the artist’s previous works, he has brought other cultural groups to the forefront, such as high school girls and Ajumma, Korean middle aged women; similarities and codes of conduct and dress in these groups becoming clear through repetition. With Cosmetic Girls, Oh takes the idea of group cohesion a step further by photographing his subjects in the studio, each of them maintaining the same expression and holding the same pose.

Hein-kuhn Oh, Hye-ri Yoo, Age 18, February 13, 2008, 2008

The artist photographs not only portraits for this series, but also takes full figured photos of the girls as they sit upon a cloth-draped stool, hands folded in their laps. By placing them against different, yet repeating, solid-colored backgrounds – light pink, yellow, blue – Oh highlights the limits of individuality within the girls’ strict definition of beauty. Through his distanced, survey-like and yet bold images, the photographer lets us see something deeper inside the young women whose faces are painted, hair dyed, bangs cut and eyes sometimes covered with light-colored contacts. These girls go against a tradition that dictates that they should not wear make-up, but ironically, they conform to a mass media-influenced new code that is accepted within their age-specific group, dictating what is beautiful.

Hein-kuhn Oh, Su-ra Kang, Age 18, July 19, 2008, 2008*

Hein-kuhn Oh was born in Seoul in 1963. He graduated from the Brooks Institute of Photography and Ohio University. His career as a photographer was firmly established through his series’ Ajumma (1999) and Girl’s Act (2004), which were shown at the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. Oh participated in group exhibitions such as Deadpan at James Gallery at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Correspondence at Artsonje Center in Korea in 2008 and Elastic Taboo at the Vienna Kunsthalle in Austria in 2007. Institutions that have acquired his work include The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Ilmin Museum of Art and Artsonje Center in Korea and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan. Cosmetic Girls was his first solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in Korea in 2008.