Shatto Gallery is proud to present Unlimited, a solo exhibition by Southern California-based artist Ji Oh, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery. Spanning the many distinct phases of Oh’s extensive, multidisciplinary career, Unlimited interrogates the transformative potential of various media, thereby resituating materiality not as a means to an end, but as the primary locus of artistic inquiry.

A central throughline in Oh’s practice is the constant negotiation of boundaries. In this light, the exhibition's title—Unlimited—reveals a compelling irony; rather than a proclamation of boundlessness, it is an acknowledgment of the inherent limitations posed by the materiality of each medium, and a testament to her enduring endeavor to question and expand them. Rejecting the notion that a medium is constrained to a fixed identity or function, Oh dissects, explores, and experiments with various materials while engaging with art history, cultural memory, and the natural world to challenge and reinterpret established artistic and historical narratives. 

Photographs are cleaved, woven, and reconstructed into new spatial tessellations. Textiles are repurposed and reworked as material collage, sculpted, manipulated, dyed, and remade into both the surface and subject of a painting. Found objects, liberated from their original functions, are reassembled to unlock new visual and conceptual possibilities.

Oh’s exploration of materiality is compellingly demonstrated in Light and Spirit, a large-scale fabric installation in which she assembles textile remnants into a 'stained glass' quilt. Gauzy, diaphanous fabrics are patchworked into a colorful, tessellated plane that mimics the kaleidoscopic effect of light filtering through a prism. By doing so, she draws a parallel between the ethereal translucency of gauze and that of glass, while subtly evoking the material ambiguity of glass as an amorphous solid through the fluid, draped nature of the fabric.

Collectively, Unlimited is the self-portrait of an inquisitive artist focused not on what materials, images, and narratives are, but on what they can become. For Oh, artmaking is a refusal of permanence. Rejecting the idea that there are fixed boundaries in art, she proves that within each medium and idea lies an inherent latency, a quiet potential waiting to be transformed into something new.