Will you Marry Me? — Subtitled NYC

Will you Marry Me?

02.15 – 03.23.2025

Kai Oh

Shapes that once suggested familiar forms are cut, flattened, and stitched, only to reemerge as something unexpected—uncanny, even: a dog’s muzzle, a gummy bear, or a face caught in either a smile or a gasp. In her latest series, Unpleasant Episodes, Kai Oh weaves together humor, defiance, and—crucially—her own breasts and nipples. For Oh, the body is a site of both intimacy and projection, shaped as much by personal experience as by external scrutiny. Women’s breasts and nipples, in particular, are often subject to double standards: celebrated as symbols of beauty or desire under certain conditions, yet deemed indecent and in need of covering or flattening under others. Oh confronts these contradictions through the fragmentation and reassembly of these bulbous curves and protrusions, underscoring how they are simultaneously hyper-visible and overlooked.

By foregrounding her body, Oh intentionally objectifies herself, a gesture that draws inevitable comparisons to self-exposure in pornographic imagery. However, rather than offering her image for easy consumption, Oh’s work questions the cultural mechanisms that both fetishize and regulate women’s bodies. Her primary method is digital collage; by layering and blending, she deconstructs and reconfigures breasts and nipples, exposing how bodies are flattened and codified into objects or symbols. What might appear sensual or maternal in one context instead becomes something altogether different here—a grotesque yet whimsical presence, severed from its usual associations.

This tension becomes more pronounced through her use of culturally charged references, such as hand-painted depictions of “kimchi” or “rag”—terms in Korea’s gendered discourse that are employed pejoratively to belittle women as materialistic or promiscuous. By reappropriating these slurs with absurd or laughable forms, Oh critiques the double standards imposed on women’s bodies and destabilizes their hold. Fragments of breasts and nipples, alongside decontextualized symbols originally designed to confine women within easily consumable images, resist the projected gaze; instead, they manifest as unruly and irreverent. This act of both fragmentation and reconstruction—literal and conceptual—highlights the absurdity of societal constructs.

Oh deepens this critique by engaging directly with the materiality of her work. She has long explored not just photographic images but also the technical supports that bear them—surfaces, frames, and their physical manifestations. This practice expands in her current series with the inclusion of silk and soil as integral materials. The silk, with its translucency, evokes an interplay between concealment and revelation, reflecting the tension between how bodies are perceived and how they are projected. Soil, meanwhile, acts as a grounding element—tactile and symbolic. Its capacity to form mounds and curves, along with its inherent instability, parallels the nature of digital collage: fluid and mutable, yet tethered to reality. Together, these materials enrich the themes of dismantling and rebuilding the imagery of the body.

Will You Marry Me? does not merely invite the viewer to reconsider women’s bodies or their visual representations; it actively destabilizes the frameworks through which they are perceived. What if breasts and nipples could refuse their cultural scripts—slipping out of the grasp of beauty, desire, or shame—and become instead absurd, playful, even cartoonish: easy to laugh at yet discomfiting to truly see? In this space of disassembly and resistance, Oh’s compositions offer no straightforward resolutions; they refuse to resolve, to cohere, or to be consumed. Instead, they compel us to grapple with their refusal, asking: what if bodies could be liberated not just from objectification, but from the very need to make sense at all?

– Ho Won Kim

Kai Oh (b. 1992, Seoul) is a visual artist who reimagines the boundaries of photography, using her lens to capture the absurdity of the everyday and the overlooked vitality in urban spaces. Her work delves into the complex layers of her identity as a Korean woman and the broader East Asian experience, intertwining these themes with the fluid and mutable nature of digital images. Her specific interest in questioning conventions is deeply rooted in her Korean identity. Kai’s persistent interest in subverting images and conventions stems from growing up in a society that often emphasizes conformity and perfection. Rather than focusing on polished, idealized subjects, she gravitates toward the raw, the deviant, and the conspicuous. Defying traditional norms, she transforms digital creations into tangible, physical spaces, crafting immersive scenarios that challenge the viewer’s perception.

Kai Oh earned her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts and holds Bachelor's degrees from Seoul National University and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. Her solo exhibitions include 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).

All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York