Dislocated Visual Worlds

WorldsWhile viewing the photographic and filmic works by S'nim Oh, the question arises of whether it is possible to represent the self in a culture marked by migration, fragmentation, and hyrbridity. The self at disposition here is not the autobiographical self, which maneuvers between truth and fiction, author and subject, and is defined by a unified, hermetic, and therefore universalist set of regulations governing representation. S'nim Oh’s works show that the task of elaborating upon the depiction of the type of subject that has abandoned any sort of outdated, hollow notion of homogeneity is one of the challenges facing contemporary artists.

Putting identity into the game means more than putting the self into the image. Of perforce, it also touches upon the problems inherent in representation and communication. It involves the issue of “the essence” or “the site” of culture. How is it possible to re-appropriate and reformulate the traditional hegemony of western modes of representation and its formalized set of rules, without turning the newly acquired territory into a pure genre? What kinds of figures of thought and representation do artists like S'nim Oh use in order to create complex visual forms that (also) treat the issue of cultural difference as a productive disorientation, not as the establishment of a kind of difference that can be occupied?

S'nim Oh uses imaginary dislocating and locating in ways that conceal the possibility of constantly refiguring the process. This happens primarily in the territory of the self, meaning on the surface of a performative, transforming self-image that lies beyond the traditionally familiar. The persona S'nim Oh depicts is marked by the kind of ambivalence that uses doubling, reproductions, and differences to explode the notion of belonging to a homelike, familiar image of the world. This doubling, however, should not be interpreted as a boundary drawn between the inside and outside, between the self and non-space, since the intervention and invention displayed by the hybrid subject includes equal amounts of interior and exterior. S'nim Oh’s depictions and self-portraits seem to not only comprehend inside and outside equally, but also suggest visual worlds, undepicted aspects of the past, of the imagined past, moments that do not belong to the dispositive of the “grand narratives,” but haunt the present and search for figuration.