The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Chris Oh

While Oh’s admiration for Renaissance titans came about more recently, his passion for artmaking and penchant for copying arose during his childhood in Portland. “As a kid I was constantly drawing and copying pictures I’d find in encyclopedias and comic books,” said Oh, eternally grateful for how his parents encouraged his craft. Their myriad interests and flair for observation would also prove deeply inspiring. “A staple in their household was natural specimens, like flowers, shells, rocks, seedpods—everyday things that they would find on walks around Oregon and then display,” the artist explained.

Oh went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he obtained his BFA in 2004 before dabbling in various creative jobs, like vintage poster restoration, and finding his footing as a professional artist. He began working in a photorealistic style, painting portraits of his friends and copying images mined from the Internet based on his interests in mythology and fantasy. In an early series, for example, Oh referenced vintage book covers from the late 1960s through ’80s by sci-fi writers such as Philip K. Dick, whose 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired Blade Runner. Oh found himself gravitating “towards books that encompassed bigger questions about life and existence,” but as a photorealistic painter, he struggled with fostering a strong concept in his work.

The year leading up to his first solo show, “PLAYS,” in 2016 at Fortnight Institute—a since-shuttered downtown New York gallery that championed avant-garde artists—was among Oh’s most experimental and revelatory. Longing to break out of rectangular composition and off the wall, the artist began trading out canvas for ephemera found around his home and studio. “Each piece was like a puzzle,” recalled Oh of the challenge of painting on old towels, bed sheets, and tote bags. In his studio was a print of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right (1510–13), one of his favorite drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oh decided to paint the image onto an Ikea dish towel.

This piece, as well as other painted found objects and earlier book-cover works, was featured in “PLAYS.” While Oh felt the show legitimized his art career, its range left him confused about his practice’s direction. When seeking a common thread among the disparate source material, he realized that several works pulled from Northern European Renaissance imagery.

He was especially enthralled by the period’s depictions of the natural world, which were “sophisticated and realistic, but not fully because certain conventions of perspective and anatomy had not been established,” he said. “These works had this uncanny feel that felt really refreshing to me.” Beyond its subject matter, the period’s embrace of copying as an integral part of artistic training also resonated with Oh. He was no longer burdened by the notion that an artist must conceive original compositions to be successful.

Admittedly having turned his back on the Old Masters for most of his life in the quest to make art that was “contemporary and fresh,” Oh began researching Renaissance artists and thinkers like Italian priest and Neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino. “This subject matter has stuck with me because it turned out to be so expansive and fascinating,” he said, noting his interest in the intense symbology embedded within Renaissance artworks, as well as the lore behind the enigmatic artists themselves. What Oh calls the “polarized spectrums” often explored in the art of this period, such as light versus dark or growth versus decay, also inform his material choices. “A crystal can represent the underworld because it comes from the earth, but it also transmits light, therefore, having celestial significance,” he offered as an example.

The thrill of the hunt for unique materials is an especially stimulating aspect of Oh’s practice. He scours online marketplaces like eBay and Etsy for natural materials and other coveted items. Favorite finds include “tramp art” frames (a late 19th-century American folk art movement known for its handcrafted woodwork), anatomical science models, and marbled paper, which the artist loves for its “fluid and psychedelic qualities.” Oh relishes incorporating the paper’s pre-existing details into his compositions, as he does with those on shells or burl wood, leaving them untouched wherever possible.

Oh’s creative process employs both traditional and 21st-century technologies. The artist typically creates a mockup of his desired artwork in Photoshop before painting the object under a magnifying lens. He has spent a decade learning to make acrylic paint—which he prefers for its adaptability to different surfaces—look like oil through a technique that involves stippling and cross-hatching. Oh connects his painterly precision to other Renaissance artistic traditions like miniatures and illuminated manuscripts. For the artist, “working at this small scale can be so intimate and transportive.”

As much as Oh reveres the Old Masters, his practice has also been shaped by artists of subsequent centuries. Like Marcel Duchamp, Oh said he “strives for an unexpected reveal,” in which ordinary objects are transformed. Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, meanwhile, taught him to think about installations and “the experience of art beyond the studio.” Oh calls Marilyn Minter’s approach to painting “revolutionary,” citing her “ability to trick the eye into thinking a work looks realistic far away and have it fall apart when you look up close.” Oh deploys his own forms of trickery, such as using mirrors and trompe l’œil, lending his work a distinctly surrealistic quality.

For many exhibitions, Oh has focused on the work of a single artwork or artist. In “Timeshare,” a 2017 group show in New York with the nomadic curatorial entity Duplex, the artist concentrated on Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (1435). Inspired by the work’s “severity of emotion,” he isolated its details, painting them on everyday materials. On a golden shipping envelope, for example, is Christ’s pale bleeding hand, while a crumbled black plastic bag depicts Mary of Clopas’s grieving visage. Subsequent exhibition highlights include a 2020 solo presentation at Independent with Fortnight Institute, centering on Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1477); and Oh’s second solo show with the gallery, “Landscapes,” which focused on Hieronymus Bosch. Oh’s next solo, coming up in 2025 at Antwerp’s Newchild Gallery, will be his most immersive yet. Concentrating exclusively on Jan van Eyck’s The Ghent Altarpiece (ca. 1423–32), he will paint on salvaged window frames to mimic the shutters of the Flemish master’s work.

As for long-term goals, Oh hopes to return to where it all began: Leonardo da Vinci. “Eventually I want to try and paint the Mona Lisa,” he said, acknowledging that past attempts at capturing the Italian artist’s details have proven enormously difficult. But when has a technical challenge ever stopped Oh?

The Artsy Vanguard 2025