The Good Oil

In this episode I visit Seung Yul Oh at his home and studio in Pt Chevalier, Auckland

In the last 20 years since graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and then Master of Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, Seung has established a widely celebrated practice encompassing sculpture and painting.

His work can be seen across Aotearoa, including at the Brick Bay sculpture park, as part of the exterior of the Te Pae Ōtautahi Convention Centre, and is held in numerous public and private collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, The Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria.

There are images of the paintings and sculptures that we talk about on The Good Oil Seung Yul Oh Instagram Post for your reference.

You’ll hear Seung talk about how pleasantly surprised he was by his secondary school art classes in NZ, how his Sonority minimalist colour field paintings are an examination of self through colours, the wholly emotional approach to choosing colour for those abstract minimalist paintings, contrasted with trying to be as much like a soulless robot as possible in actually applying the paint to create them, the importance of getting lost to allow discovery, but how difficult that can be sometimes and how he pushes through that, and how new loose mark making abstract works have prompted him to pluck up the courage to return to working with oil paint.