Shatto Gallery is proud to present Unlimited, a solo exhibition by the Southern California-based artist Ji Oh, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery. Spanning the many overlapping phases of Oh’s extensive, multidisciplinary career, Unlimited interrogates the transformative potential of various mediums, thus resituating materiality as the primary locus of artistic inquiry.
A central throughline in Oh’s practice is the constant negotiation of boundaries. In this light, there lies a striking irony to the exhibition title. Unlimited is not a proclamation of the artist’s ascendance, but both an acknowledgement of the inherent limitations posed by each medium’s materiality and a testament to Oh’s endeavor to question and expand them. Rejecting the notion that a medium is constrained to a fixed identity or function, she dissects, explores, and experiments with various materials while engaging with art history, cultural memory, and the natural world to challenge and reinterpret established artistic and historical narratives.
Rather than following a thematic or chronological order, Unlimited adopts a methodological framework to showcase the multitudinous ways Oh tackles artistic questions and challenges. Several sections of the gallery are devoted to the artist’s large-scale textile paintings. Here, repurposed fabrics are sculpted, dyed, and collaged, serving as both the medium and the subject.
Another portion of the gallery, which includes works from her rewoven photographic tessellation series as well as playfully textured 3D paintings, focuses on Oh’s enduring interest in how methods and materials shape our visual perspectives. This focus on materiality carries into the exhibition’s sculptural installations: Light and Spirit is a large-scale work in which textile remnants are assembled into a “stained-glass” quilt, drawing parallels between diaphanous gauze and amorphous solid glass, while Water masterfully manipulates rigid ceramic and plastic into a dynamic representation of flowing water.
Unlimited is the self-portrait of an inquisitive artist focused not on what materials, images, and narratives are, but on what they can become. For Oh, artmaking is a refusal of permanence. Rejecting the idea that there are fixed boundaries in art, she proves that within each medium and idea lies an unbound potential waiting to be transformed into something new.
Ji Oh is a Southern California-based multimedia artist. She received her BFA from California State University, Fullerton, and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Oh has presented over ten solo exhibitions across the United States and Asia, alongside numerous group exhibitions spanning the US, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including a recent showcase at the Museum of Fashion and Textiles in Naples, Italy.
