Installation view of Oum Jeong-soon's solo exhibition, "Fuzz - Tangible Incident," at Hakgojae Gallery in Seoul / Courtesy of the artist and Hakgojae Gallery
In a well-known parable, three blind men encounter an elephant. Each reaches out and touches only one part. One feels the trunk and insists the creature must be a snake. Another runs his hands along the leg and declares it a tree. A third grips the tail and imagines a rope.
As they argue, the king finally intervenes. None of them, he says, are grasping the whole truth. An elephant cannot be understood in fragments.
The story is often read as a warning about the limits of individual experience, telling us that a narrow perspective cannot lead one to deeper truths. But artist Oum Jeong-soon sees the tale differently. Rather than a rebuke of human perception, she reads it as an invitation to reconsider it.
“Yes, human senses are extremely limited. The world I can experience within the palm of my hand is very small. I can’t possibly know the whole elephant,” she said at Seoul’s Hakgojae Gallery, where her latest solo exhibition is on view. “But perhaps what we grasp in fragments shouldn’t be dismissed. Perhaps they are the very passage through which we move toward the whole.”
For more than a decade, elephants have made recurring appearances in her body of work. Through them, the artist questions the primacy of sight — and the assumption that art is, above all, a visual experience — while proposing other ways of sensing and understanding the world.
“What does it really mean to ‘see’?” she said. “That question has stayed with me since adolescence. My eyes were open, but I often felt as though I wasn’t truly seeing.”
The question took on new urgency in 1996, when she began teaching art at a school for blind students. That experience later became the foundation for her own workshop series, where she would bring a group of students to encounter a living elephant. After exploring the creature through touch, the children produced works of their own. The forms that emerged as a result were completely new ways of imagining an animal.
Installation view of Oum Jeong-soon's "Fuzz - Tangible Incident" at Hakgojae Gallery / Courtesy of the artist and Hakgojae Gallery
At the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, Oum’s installation “Elephant Without Trunk” received the $100,000 Park Seo-bo Art Prize. The sculpture removes the animal’s most recognizable feature, forcing the audience to reconsider a form they think they already know.
Source: Korea Times News
