Park Han-sol reports on Korea's financial regulators, along with fintech and insurance. She previously wrote about the art world, from biennales and exhibitions to fairs and auctions, with a focus on Seoul and the figures shaping the scene. Before joining The Korea Times, she spent a year at ABC News' Seoul bureau, contributing to coverage of major Asia-Pacific events.
Imagining the elephant in Oum Jeong-soon’s room
Installation view of Oum Jeong-soon's solo exhibition, "Fuzz - Tangible Incident," at Hakgojae Gallery in Seoul / Courtesy of the artist and Hakgojae Gallery
By Park Han-sol
Artist’s new show proposes other ways of sensing our world
In a well-known parable, three blind men encounter an elephant. Each reaches out and touches only one part. One feels the trunk and insists the creature must be a snake. Another runs his hands along the leg and declares it a tree. A third grips the tail and imagines a rope.
As they argue, the king finally intervenes. None of them, he says, are grasping the whole truth. An elephant cannot be understood in fragments.
The story is often read as a warning about the limits of individual experience, telling us that a narrow perspective cannot lead one to deeper truths. But artist Oum Jeong-soon sees the tale differently. Rather than a rebuke of human perception, she reads it as an invitation to reconsider it.
“Yes, human senses are extremely limited. The world I can experience within the palm of my hand is very small. I can’t possibly know the whole elephant,” she said at Seoul’s Hakgojae Gallery, where her latest solo exhibition is on view. “But perhaps what we grasp in fragments shouldn’t be dismissed. Perhaps they are the very passage through which we move toward the whole.”
For more than a decade, elephants have made recurring appearances in her body of work. Through them, the artist questions the primacy of sight — and the assumption that art is, above all, a visual experience — while proposing other ways of sensing and understanding the world.
“What does it really mean to ‘see’?” she said. “That question has stayed with me since adolescence. My eyes were open, but I often felt as though I wasn’t truly seeing.”
The question took on new urgency in 1996, when she began teaching art at a school for blind students. That experience later became the foundation for her own workshop series, where she would bring a group of students to encounter a living elephant. After exploring the creature through touch, the children produced works of their own. The forms that emerged as a result were completely new ways of imagining an animal.
Installation view of Oum Jeong-soon's "Fuzz - Tangible Incident" at Hakgojae Gallery / Courtesy of the artist and Hakgojae Gallery
At the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, Oum’s installation “Elephant Without Trunk” received the $100,000 Park Seo-bo Art Prize. The sculpture removes the animal’s most recognizable feature, forcing the audience to reconsider a form they think they already know.
To resist the dominance of sight, she also invited visitors to put their hands on the piece. The forms, made of soft wool and fabric, became an unusually tactile presence within the white cube of the space.
“I wanted to expand the boundaries of how we experience art,” she noted. “When visitors were told they could freely touch it, the space became a kind of zone of liberation.”
Within a week, the sculpture’s surface had begun to fuzz and pill from countless hands. At first, she panicked and started trimming the fibers. But then she realized this wasn’t something that needed to be removed. It held everyone’s body heat.
“That was the moment my perspective shifted completely,” she noted. “Inside the tiny fibers were all these sensations — friction, temperature and even germs.”
She began collecting the lint left behind by the hands of more than half a million visitors. Those tiny pills of fuzz now reappear in her Seoul show, “Fuzz - Tangible Incident,” as part of the “Patternless Rhythm” series.
“Sooner or later, someone will claim they have a share in this piece,” the artist said with a smile. “Even at the exhibition opening, people were saying, ‘I touched it, too.' 'So did I.’”
Oum Jeong-soon's "The Moment 2001-1" / Courtesy of the artist and Hakgojae Gallery
The striking centerpiece of the show is “The Moment 2001-1,” a room-spanning installation in which the pages of 1,000 Braille school textbooks flutter in the wind.
The idea traces back to her years teaching at a school for blind students, where one day, she made a visit to their tiny library.
“In most homes, the shelves overflow with books. But this library felt strangely starved,” Oum recalled. “These students are living in the same image-saturated world as everyone else, yet there were so few books through which they could learn about images. That hunger in the library felt like it was asking me a question.”
Oum Jeong-soon's "The Elephant Written in Graphite – The Unwritten Library" / Courtesy of the artist and Hakgojae Gallery
At the center of the room sits a single volume penned by the artist, retelling the parable of the blind men and the elephant, However, this one does not dismiss the limits of human perception. The book relays the story using both Braille and handwritten charcoal text. As visitors trace the Braille with their fingers, the charcoal letters smear and gradually disappear.
“By the time the exhibition comes to an end, I hope the book will have turned completely black,” Oum said. “Like the fuzz on the elephant, it may become a new material, something created together with the audience.”
“Fuzz - Tangible Incident” runs through March 28.