FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
PAGE 10 • WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2026 • NO. 167
In a World of Shadows, Specters, and Memories
The Frankfurt-based Korean artist Hyunju Oh transforms the Alte Schmelze with her powerful multimedia installations
by CHRISTOPH SCHÜTTE
It is always astonishing to see what can be made of this place—how painters, sculptors, and video artists engage with the conditions of the space and turn them to their advantage. After all, the exhibition venue on the grounds of the Milchsackfabrik in Frankfurt’s Gutleutviertel is anything but a conventional white cube; quite the contrary. The walls of this worn hall are not only graced by picturesque flaking plaster, graffiti, tags, and delicate, graphic cracks, but—even though the gelatin cookers departed from the Alte Schmelze decades ago—its beams, chains, and pits still bear witness to the grueling labor of bygone days.
Now, as Hyunju Oh (born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1988) activates this former industrial building with “Shadows of Pressure,” this holds true to an exceptional degree. Moving effortlessly across different media, she impressively interweaves sound, installation, sculpture, performance, and the found conditions into a dense atmosphere—creating multimedia installations where sounds, fabrics, verses, voids, and blind spots bind together into that very texture we call memory. At first, one sees little other than a scattering of bowls, basins, and buckets, which serve Oh as wash tubs for her initially brilliant white sheets.
Except that the cloths, soaked in water, clay, and the artist’s own sweat, emerge incomparably dirtier than before. As Oh hoists them up on ropes and suspends them from hooks and heavy chains, she arrives at an ensemble of objects, signs, and figures that redefines the space: a world of spirits, shadows, and specters, manifesting as if live and in color. It seems far from settled that the host of spirits gathering before the viewer's eyes is benevolent or inherently well-disposed toward the artist. The abandoned swing, the empty chair, the stiff and brittle dried cloths—these are motifs frequently strained in art.
Yet with Oh, they appear perhaps one last time entirely free of redundancy. Meanwhile, the watercolors exhibited in the adjacent room hint at the fact that the Frankfurt-based artist studied painting in Korea before turning to sound art and performative formats in Kiel, Mainz, and Linz. These gently abstracted landscapes—at times impulsive with two or three brushstrokes, at times somnambulistically drawn from a single line—seem so attuned to the cracks meandering across the wall and the structures seemingly responding to the stained plaster that, contrary to reason, one might believe they were created right here, facing this very wall.
And yet, more than anything else, these works also speak of images. And of memory. “Mother was my landscape” is the title inscribed above the installation in the main hall—one that sends a chill through the viewer. In that very spirit, before these thoroughly modest pieces of nature, one might discern day and night, light and shadow; one might find a river, perhaps a mountain, and ultimately storms, rain, and thunder mirrored within the landscapes. But the tone set by these sheets is different—as though Oh has shifted her perspective. The darkness, the shadows, and the specters may well remain. Here, however, they are welcomed. And feared no longer.
A striking spatial presence:
Hyunju Oh soaks fabric in clay and suspends it from ropes.
Hyunju Oh, “Shadows of Pressure.” Alte Schmelze at the Milchsackfabrik, Frankfurt, Gutleutstraße 294. Through August 2; open Friday through Sunday from 4 to 7 p.m.
Solo show “Shadows of Pressure”, curated by Jacqueline Jakobi Millán, Alte Schmelze, Frankfurt am Main Germany (2026) (Photo: Jens Gerber, Hyunju Oh)