Painting in hanji, ink, and shellac — a surface that records what held and what fell away.
Hanji, ink, and shellac on panel · 2024–2026
On absorption, sealing, and what remains
The artist sets the conditions; the material answers.
On a wooden panel I lay down hand-ground ink to make a black surface. Over it I place hanji — Korean mulberry paper — pour shellac, and scrape. Pour and scrape, thousands of times. The shellac soaks into the fibers of the paper and into the skin of the panel beneath it. Some regions bond and become inseparable; others sit only on top and eventually fall away. I do not decide where that boundary falls.
This is a practice — a pressing down of noise, a return to oneself through repetition. The surface becomes a topography of time pressed into matter: areas that stayed, areas that faded, areas that left entirely. We do not get to choose what remains. What we tried hardest to hold often slips away; what we barely noticed sometimes stays for a lifetime.
The work draws from the practice-based vocabulary of Dansaekhwa, but as long as shellac is involved it can never be a single color. Black and amber coexist; bonded and lost regions push against each other on the same surface. Nothing resolves into one — a condition that refuses to resolve, asked again on a surface that refuses the same.
Dae Hak Oh (오대학), b. 1998
Dae Hak Oh is a Korean-born artist based in New York, where he is completing his MFA in Studio Art at New York University, Steinhardt. He holds a BFA in Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Before painting, he moved through music, film, and other disciplines — a path of many beginnings that now underlies a practice about what time leaves behind. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Seoul, Chicago, and New York.
Working with hanji, hand-ground ink, and shellac, his paintings treat absorption and sealing as a form of practice: a way of asking how anything meant to last truly remains, in a time when too much drifts past.