Johyun Gallery_Seoul presents Strata of Being, An Existential Odyssey, a solo exhibition of works by Ouhi Cha, who has worked between Korea and Berlin for over four decades. The exhibition brings together paintings from the signature Ship of Odyssey series and a new body of work inspired by Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), and is the artist's first solo presentation with the gallery since joining as a represented artist in 2025.
Ouhi Cha’s childhood memories at the port of Busan are the point of departure for a practice that traverses the terrain between personal interiority and the universal tragedies and hopes of humankind. Born in 1945, the year of Korea's liberation, and among the first cohort of students to receive formal art education at Korean universities, Cha relocated to Berlin in 1985 on a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship. Her nomadic existence between Korea and Germany has given rise to a singular aesthetic, one in which the visceral energy of German Expressionism and the contemplative spatial philosophy of East Asian sumuk (Indian-inkwash) painting converge. In 1989, Cha witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall firsthand, and incorporated cement fragments from the Wall into installation works that translated historical upheaval into the language of form. That same body of work led to her participation in 1990 as a German national in both the 8th Sydney Biennale and the Venice Biennale Turkish Pavilion. Historical turmoil and individual existence have remained central to her practice since, notably in Kunst gegen Gewalt (Art Against Violence), Berlin, 2010. Art critic Seo Sung-rok has described her work as "the product of a fierce critical inquiry that seeks to restore, as artistic memory, the suffering of individuals rendered powerless before the violence of history," calling it "an existential voyage toward the truth of being."
Black and white, reduced to a minimal palette, compose canvases that resemble the wake of a vessel erasing its own trace. Illegible coordinates intimate direction across the surface, into which dust gathered from burned letters and other remnants has seeped. Sand, cement, and pigment are layered onto the canvas, then repeatedly scraped with knife and brush until forms emerge: signs and numerals, ladders and wings. These are traces inscribed upon the skin of a life that has passed through the long days of voyage. Indelible clues of memory, having passed through strata of matter, shimmer across the surface in condensed form.
The Winterreise series, newly presented in this exhibition, opens another dimension of this navigational narrative. The earlier Odyssey works operated within a mythic structure predicated on return; Winterreise, by contrast, addresses a state in which return is indefinite and suspended, a condition of enduring existential solitude. Schubert's restrained measure and tension, transposed onto canvases steeped in grey, become configurations of signs and lines. The concrete memory of music, imprinted through Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's interpretation, functions as material substrate, yet ultimately persists as illegible notation. This transposition is consonant with the artist's conviction of revealing memory not through explication but through erasure: to use material, but leave none of it behind.
Four decades of voyage culminate in this presentation at her country of birth, another moment of passage that contemplates the strata of being revealed in the interval between the lowering and raising of an anchor. To the contemporary moment goverened by speed and immediacy, Ouhi Cha's canvases respond with the density of existence.
