If you find yourself in the Sloane Square area over the Easter period, do pop in to the Garrison Chapel in the new Chelsea Barracks development. It’s a lovely, airy space used primarily for exhibitions, and currently there’s a group show, launched on International Women’s Day, featuring work by eighteen female artists.
One of those artists is Oh Myung-hee, who had a brief solo show at the nearby Saatchi Gallery back in 2017, and who was invited to participate in the European Cultural Centre at the 2022 Venice Biennale. You can find a virtual tour of her Venice installation in one of the grand rooms of the Palazzo Moro here, and read some reviews and her own introduction to that project, entitled The Days were Snowy but Warm, here.
Oh’s contribution to the current exhibition is A Long Line of Trees, a set of three bronze wall-hung sculptures featuring the cascading branches and delicate blossoms of plum and cherry trees.
The first in the series features a tiny gilt-bronze bird in flight among the branches of a cherry tree, together with a scarf made out of lacquer and decorated with mother-of-pearl, caught at the top of the tree. Art critic Oh Kwang-su explains that a scarf, gently floating in the wind, is an early motif in Oh Kyung-mee’s work: rather like the scene in the movie American Beauty she was captivated by the sight of a plastic bag dancing in the wind, and this scene was taken up in her work, transformed into a feminine scarf suspended by the breeze.
The second sculpture is the most opulent: a circular moon – covered in gold leaf – hides behind a waterfall of white and red plum blossom, while two swallows cavort on the surface of the disk.
In the final piece, mother of pearl flowers and a swallow in flight decorate three interconnected dark bronze plates, in front of which are the drooping branches of bronze cherry-blossoms.
The works are a perfect tribute to springtime, as well as celebrating the materials and techniques (mother-of-pearl and lacquer) of traditional Korean craft and recalling a subgenre of folk painting known as Hwajo-do which depicts flowers and birds.
LKL visited the Garrison Chapel on Thursday 21 March 2024. The exhibition lasts until 6 April. Exhibition notice here.