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Artist Oum Jeong-soon challenges the idea of what it means to 'see' art in new exhibition

Published: 26 Feb. 2026, 17:50 Updated: 03 Mar. 2026, 16:36

LEE JIAN
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Deconstructed wool elephant pieces and a ceramic elephant from Oum Jeong-soon's "Elephant Without Trunk" series are displayed at her solo show "Fuzz - Tangible Incident" at Hakgojae Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, on Feb. 26. [LEE JIAN]

What does it mean to see?

Though born with two healthy eyes, artist Oum Jeong-soon has never felt like she could truly see. Since childhood, she sensed something immeasurably vast surrounding her — something that could never be completely grasped or seen by anyone, even herself.

That private struggle stayed with her and ultimately led her to pursue art. She earned a BFA in painting from Ewha Womans University, followed by an MFA in the same discipline from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München in Germany in the 1980s. She then became a professor in the department of painting at the College of Arts at Konkuk University in Seoul, but she still found herself gripped by her questions regarding sight. As a result, she founded the nonprofit art lab Another Way of Seeing in 1996, collaborating with visually impaired artists on a wide range of projects.

Now 64, Oum turns her lifelong inquiry toward her audience.

“Fuzz - Tangible Incident,” which opened at Hakgojae Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, on Wednesday, invites viewers to practice “tactile viewing.” The exhibition juxtaposes her long-running “The Elephant without Trunk” series — comprising wool sculptures, paintings and prints that fragment the image of an elephant into tactile sections — with 1,000 Braille books. Spanning multiple mediums, the exhibition continues Oum’s investigation into what it means to see.

“Fuzz” refers to lint, the tiny fibers that detach from fabric and onto another surface following physical contact. Many of Oum’s canvases, which fuse paint and tapestry, bear such fuzz.

This was not intentional at first.

In 2023, when her “The Elephant without Trunk” series was presented at the Gwangju Biennale, she invited viewers to experience the works through touch.

“When we make something, we inevitably use all of our senses, whether we’re aware of it or not. The act of creation is never purely optical. But once we define a piece as ‘visual art,’ our sensory engagement with it becomes drastically reduced. Communication is expected to happen only through the eyes,” Oum told reporters at Hakgojae on Thursday.

“I questioned that as an artist. The creative process is multisensory, so why must the mode of reception be limited to sight alone? I consider the viewer’s act of experiencing the work to be part of the work itself. If that is the case, shouldn’t the viewer be allowed to engage with the piece with their whole body?”

After the Biennale, however, she noticed that the wool elephants had become covered with lint from visitors’ repeated touches.

“I hadn’t expected that to happen. At first, I thought I needed to remove the fuzz because it looked dirty. But with a slight shift in perspective, I came to love and value it.”

At Hakgojae, Oum expands on her discovery. She further deconstructs the fuzz-covered elephant, its parts now translated into lithographs and vividly colored paintings. By deliberately shifting mediums, she tests whether a single idea can survive multiple forms.

“You can’t touch an entire elephant at once,” she said. “It stands in for something immense, something that cannot be comprehended in its totality.”

Her thinking echoes the Buddhist parable from the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, in which a king observes as blind men each touch a different part of an elephant and describe their respective experience. Because of its size, each man can only grasp a part of the animal. In some versions of the story, the king dismisses their words, arguing that a part cannot stand for the whole — that fragments do not automatically add up to totality.

“This idea of ‘the part,’ or what I call a corner or an edge, became very important to me,” Oum said. “Human perception is extremely limited. The world I can encounter with the palm of my hand is very small. I can only explore corner. I cannot grasp the vast whole at once.

“But perhaps that corner should not be dismissed. Perhaps it is a passage toward the whole.”

We live in a world too vast to be fully understood at a single glance. Through “Fuzz - Tangible Incident,” Oum leaves viewers with a question: Where, in which corner, are you touching, seeing now?

“Fuzz - Tactile Incident” runs through March 28.

BY LEE JIAN [[email protected]]