OK Seungcheol

OK Seungcheol (b. 1988) explores concepts that arise between originality and authenticity, as well as between digital imagery and physical materiality. Drawing from endlessly reproduced and altered digital images sourced from visual media such as comics, films, and video games, he treats these as a kind of "original" from which new works are generated. His practice traverses traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture, as well as the boundaries between reality and virtuality, through acts of output and reproduction. OK is particularly interested in the irony that emerges from the intersection of the “lightness” of digital images—infinitely reproducible—and the “weight” of artworks that assert their uniqueness. For OK, painting is not a tradition to be restored, but a point of departure—an “original image” that can be adapted in scale and purpose depending on curatorial context and exhibition space, and extended into three-dimensional objects. His process begins with vector coordinates inside a computer program, and through traditional mediums such as canvas and paint, he translates these controllable, digital coordinates into tangible reality. His works go beyond mere shifts in perspective; they aim to reconfigure the essence of an image in subtle ways—akin to the logic of a video game’s character creation tool, where slight changes in hair color or skin tone generate visually similar yet distinct figures. Digital images, degraded to the point where any sense of an original has been lost, are reassembled and reinterpreted within the figurative framework of a character’s face. In OK’s work, such concepts are visualized in the digital realm and subsequently materialized through his hand across various surfaces and substances.

OK Seungcheol was born in Seoul in 1988 and earned his BFA in Western Painting from Chung-Ang University in 2013. He has held solo exhibitions at venues including Parco Museum Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan, 2024), Tuesday to Friday (Valencia, Spain, 2024) and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, Korea, 2022). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as Busan Museum of Contemporary Art (Busan, Korea, 2024), Schema Art Museum (Cheongju, Korea, 2023), DMZ Paju (Paju, Korea, 2023), K11 (Shanghai, China, 2023), Daejeon Museum of Art (Daejeon, Korea, 2021), Daegu Art Museum (Daegu, South Korea, 2019), and Platform L Contemporary Art Center (Seoul, Korea, 2019).