Advertisement, which determines the current of popular culture, has established itself as an important medium of communication for not only the maker and the consumer but the artist and the audience as well. Gwon Osang’s photographical sculpture appropriates the images from the magazine advertisements of Gucci, Ungaro, and Diesel. His work is closely re-lated to the personal pleasure, dream, voyeuristic desire, and narcissism with which the mass media presents us.

For his ‘The Flat’ series he carefully clips out the photographic images of the icons of consumer desire such as watches, jewelry, cosmetic products, shoes, and bags, attaches supporting objects on the backs of those images so as to set them up as if they were still-life sculptures and photographs them. Through this process, he endows two-dimensional objects with the three-dimensional status of a sculpture. The Flat 16, 17, 18, which is made of three panels, is composed of the images of jewels of dazzling brilliance taken from the 6-year copies of a Korean magazine entitled “Noblesse”.

His sculptural work, Red sun is originated from the poses assumed by fashion models for fashion advertisements, and reveals his inter-est in ‘poses of momentary defenselessness’. Having captured the capitalist attributes of arts, he understands both a commodity and an artwork as some things to be used up and con-sumed. Since he vests the same status in these two objects, it stands to reason that a designed, industrial product is transformed into an artwork in his work.