Who is the hunter, who is the prey?
Kai Oh: Will You Marry Me? installation view. Photo by Garrett Carroll. Courtesy of Subtitled NYC.
My first encounter with Kai Oh’s artwork from her recent solo show Will You Marry Me? at Subtitled NYC happened a couple of weeks before the opening, during a studio visit at her new place in Greenpoint. The almost intimidating scenery of her nipples everywhere may have caused the confusion that led to the loss of my set of keys—or maybe it was just the power of the conversation, which transported me into generative spaces. As we talked, I had already begun to formulate a reading of the works, navigating an immensely dense discussion of feminism, pornography, displacement, the internet, the bad and distorted image, the male gaze, cuteness, and kitsch.
Kai Oh (b. 1992, Seoul) is a New York-based visual artist who recently obtained her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees from Seoul National University and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. Her work experiments with photography, particularly images captured on an iPhone, which she distorts and collages in Photoshop. In her practice, she explores the fluidity of digital images, manipulating and pushing their boundaries, treating photographs as surfaces for paint, as textures and colors combined. Her work is a manifestation of Hito Steyerl’s concept of the poor image; manipulated images, glitch aesthetics, and the optical confusion between the digital and the real have become her artistic trademark. [1] In this show, however, Oh focuses less on the technical capacities of photography and more on digital collage as a tool to narrate personal stories of sexual objectification.
Kai Oh: Will You Marry Me? installation view. Photo by Garrett Carroll. Courtesy of Subtitled NYC.
Beyond the staged environment of piled earth, sandbags, and paper bags (Napkin series, 2025), the exhibition consists of seven tableaus hanging on the walls. These printed silk canvases stretched onto frames and painted over with acrylic, are occasionally altered with cut-outs, hanging shapes, and frayed edges. In Selfie in My Studio (2025), we see a glowing domestic scene capturing a girl from an above viewpoint. Like a moment from a horror movie, cut-out ghost hands reach toward the flat image of the subject. Yet, the feeling is not one of fear but rather a Sontagian pornography—innocence teetering on the edge of self-aware seduction. [2] The half-smiling, half-innocent face suggests both playfulness and a flicker of something else—desire, complicity, or perhaps a hidden, defiant pleasure. Across the canvas, a nipple is collaged onto the surface as though the subject were offering her body to an unknown viewer.
The other images in the show are less sexually charged, more kitschy and playful. They depict distorted, augmented romantic landscapes: fallen leaves, slender blades of grass, tree branches heavy with ripe fruit, and painted kimchi pieces floating into a heart shape. Nipples, again and again, are arranged into cute, face-like forms and gummy bear-like shapes. Their repetition renders them absurd. This Dadaist methodology of over-repetition drains the image of any element of eroticism, leaving behind something humorous yet disorienting.
Kai Oh, Kimchi-nyeo (2025). Acrylic on digital print, gesso, canvas, stretcher. 39 × 29 × 1.5 in. Photo by Garrett Carroll. Courtesy of Subtitled NYC.
On the surface, Oh’s self-objectification through provocative imagery speaks to her experience with online dating as a young, attractive Asian woman in a capitalist, materialistic culture. She digitally prints the nipple—a symbol of life, fertility, and female sexuality—onto the delicate silk fabric, a material that could just as easily cover a soft female body. Silk, too, carries other layers of meaning: it recalls the Veil of Veronica, the first “portrait” in Christian tradition, an indicator of holiness. In biblical narratives, the sacred can only be touched with covered hands. The acrylic-painted kimchi, meanwhile, introduces another potent symbol: a staple of Korean cuisine turned into a global commodity, both a marker of national pride and a derogatory term for Korean women labeled as gold diggers.
Kai Oh traps us in the act of consuming her naked body. Then, she stabs us with an acrylic “dagger” when we try to touch it. Beneath the baroque cacophony of motifs, movement, the pulsating vibrancy of color, and the overwhelming simultaneity of visual information, Oh’s artistic intentions translate clearly. She employs fragmentation and reconstruction to highlight the absurdity of societal constructs, questioning the mechanisms that both fetishize and regulate women’s bodies. Her work does not simply demand that we see—it compels us to recognize the contradictions in how bodies, especially women’s bodies, are visually consumed, controlled, and ultimately devalued.
I asked Kai to send me a list of readings that inspired her while preparing for the show, and I found Mari Ruti’s Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings especially relevant in decoding her images. [3] In this book, Ruti explores the self-censorship and ambivalence many women feel about their gender identity, shaped by historical and social conventions. One chapter references Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, which argues that women in contemporary American society are forced to choose between embracing hypersexualized desirability or rejecting it and being labeled as prudish—an impossible dichotomy that resonates with the tensions in Kai Oh’s work.
Kai Oh: Will You Marry Me? installation view. Photo by Garrett Carroll. Courtesy of Subtitled NYC.
Besides its feminist interpretation, I’d also like to connect Oh’s work to two recent discourses on contemporary visual culture: Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh and The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han. In her book, Kornbluh argues that contemporary culture prioritizes raw, unmediated experience over abstraction and form, which results in personal perception over structural analysis and collective meaning and, eventually, isolates individuals within their own immediate perceptions. By layering and distorting digital images, Oh’s work can be read as a critique of this phenomenon: she uses abstraction to resist individualism and creates collective critical discourse and political solidarity. [4] Her works reject the illusion of seamless representation, instead exposing the mediation and manipulation behind visual culture. Similarly, Han describes how digital culture erodes coherent narration, replacing it with fragmented expressions that await consumption instead of achieving lasting impact. [5] Oh’s compositions, with their looping motifs and disjointed elements, embody this breakdown, reflecting a world where meaning is increasingly shaped by algorithmic logic and fleeting visual consumption. As Oh is familiar with her audience, the contemporary art consumer’s ability to order and decode fast and flickering images lets the viewer build their narrative interpretation of the artworks. In this way, Kai Oh’s recent images serve as counter-examples—or even critiques—of both discourses.
Kai Oh’s Will You Marry Me? is open until March 23, 2025, at Subtitled NYC.
[1] Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10,” November 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
[2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
[3] Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia university press, 2018).
[4] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too-Late Capitalism (London ; New York: Verso, 2024).
[5] Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration (Cambridge Hoboken (N.J.): Polity press, 2024).
