Heinkuhn Oh (b. 1963) began his career in 1989 as a documentary photographer, capturing social landscapes on the streets. Since then, he has focused on portraiture, depicting specific types of individuals within Korean society. In addition to his photographic work, Oh has photographed posters for over 40 films, including The Contact and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.
 
Oh describes his work as “typological portrait documentary.” While his photographs may not strictly align with traditional documentary photography, they document various social groups in Korea through portraiture, creating a sort of visual archive. Moreover, his work often explores the common anxieties and emotional instability shared by individuals.

In his early career, Oh’s work had a strong documentary character, using black-and-white photography to depict social landscapes. Examples include The Americans them (1990-1991), which documented marginalized individuals in American society, and Itaewon Story (1993), which captured the people and scenery of Itaewon, a neighborhood where diverse cultures mixed.
 
Oh’s documentary photography often involves staging. For instance, his Gwangju Story (1995) series was a black-and-white re-enactment of scenes from the Gwangju Uprising of May 18, 1980. The series was photographed on the set of the film A Petal (1996), which dealt with the same historical event. In these images, actors and Gwangju citizens are intermingled, blending reality and fiction. Through this process of re-enactment, Oh captures the psychological shifts that occur as individuals remember and fictionalize historical trauma.

In 1999, he gained recognition in the art world with his ‘Ajumma’ series, exhibited at Art Sonje Center. This series, which he worked on for two years, sparked a social phenomenon by portraying Korean middle-aged women who have been absent in the social sphere, despite being someone’s ever-present as wives or mothers. The work presents the images of these middle-aged women through two axes: documentary and fiction.

Oh highlights their isolation in a male-dominated society through stark lighting and a contrasting dark background that emphasizes their heavy makeup, clothing, and accessories. The tilted frames and awkwardly cropped images convey a shared sense of anxiety and emotional turbulence.

Meanwhile, in his ‘Girl’s Act’ series, which was carried out from 2001 to 2004, Oh’s deliberate staging becomes more prominent. Though not immediately apparent in the photographs, he used constructed sets and props to shape the imagery of high school girls.
 
He worked with students from acting academies to depict stereotypical gestures and expressions associated with teenage girls, presenting not actual girls but the superficial, symbolic images that society has constructed. This blend of fiction and reality reveals a deeper social narrative.

In his ‘Cosmetic Girls’ series (2005-2008), Oh cast teenage girls from the streets and photographed their heavily made-up faces in extreme close-up, capturing every pore and peach fuzz. Through these large-scale images, he explores their insecure desires and awkward femininity.
 
The photographs objectively spotlight their attitudes and desires surrounding makeup, showing how makeup, as a coded aesthetic in modern society, serves as a psychological mechanism for these girls.

Oh’s earlier works, such as Ajumma, Girl’s Act, and Cosmetic Girls, examined images of Korean women across generations, revealing the biases and stereotypes embedded in Korean society. In contrast, his Middlemen series (2010-2013) shifted focus to the portrait of soldiers, exploring the unstable masculine image caught between the collective and the individual.

With permission from the Ministry of National Defense, Oh photographed soldiers during a project commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Korean War. Oh adopts an undercurrent of questioning South Korea’s “collective consciousness” as he focuses on the soldiers who are in the military as a group in which masculinity is enforced and people come together under their particular duty to patriotism. What he captured was the vague sense of insecurity and isolation the soldiers felt, caught somewhere between the individual and the collective.

Over the past 20 years, Heinkuhn Oh has portrayed specific groups in Korean society, such as middle-aged women, high school girls, and soldiers, capturing the anxieties they experience. In contrast, his ‘Portraying Anxiety’ series, which he has been working on since 2006, focuses not on portraits of specific groups but on anxiety itself—quite literally, “Portraying Anxiety.”
 
His 2022 solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center, “Left Face,” presented one piece from this series titled ‘Left Face’. The subjects of ‘Left Face’ are people Oh encountered around Itaewon, where his studio was located, mostly young individuals who are difficult to define by a single identity. By focusing on these marginal, ambiguous figures, Oh captures signs of a new form of anxiety in contemporary Korean society.

Oh’s work consistently centers on individuals at the periphery of mainstream society. His gaze is not limited to “the anxieties of others,” but also reflects the social control and symbolic indexes that shape contemporary life. His photographs bring to the forefront the shared emotional anxieties deeply embedded in today’s society.

“I aimed to capture that everyday anxiety, like the mild fever one feels on a languid spring day—persistent and irritating throughout the day.”

Heinkuhn Oh graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography and earned his MFA from Ohio University. He gained widespread recognition with his solo exhibition “Ajumma” (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 1999), and has since held numerous solo exhibitions at major institutions, including “Girl’s Act” (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2003), “Cosmetic Girls” (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2008), and “Middlemen” (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2012).
 
His recent exhibitions include “Left Face” (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2022) and “Portraying Anxiety” (La Chambre Gallery, Strasbourg, France, 2016). He is currently a professor in the Department of Photographic Art at the Kaywon University of Art and Design, Korea. He has published six publications, including Ajumma (1999), Girl’s Act (2003), and Middlemen (2012).

References

• 오형근, Heinkuhn Oh (Artist Website)
• 아트선재센터, 오형근: 왼쪽 얼굴 (Art Sonje Center, Heinkuhn Oh: Left face)
• 박건희문화재단, 오형근 (Parkgeonhi Foundation, Heinkuhn Oh)
• 코리안 아티스트 프로젝트, 오형근 (Korean Artist Project, Heinkuhn Oh)
• 아트선재센터, 아줌마 – 오형근 (Art Sonje Center, Ajumma - Heinkuhn Oh)
• 일민미술관, 소녀연기 (Ilmin Museum of Art, Girl’s Act)
• 국제갤러리, 소녀들의 화장법 (Kukje Gallery, Cosmetic Girls)
• 박영택, 오형근 – 불안한 초상