Audio of Oh chanting in tongues, which is part of her process when working with wire and stone:

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I had set out on my way to find a waterfall.
I had walked and walked through the desert.
And suddenly I realized that I forgot why I had searched for the waterfall.
Then even I forgot the fact that I had searched for the waterfall.
Only walking itself remained.
It was a prayer, searching for a path.

Transcendent end is hidden in our own depths, waiting for the chance to occupy a conscious moment. I try to discover and reveal the moment, weaving influences from handicraft, spirituality, and personal and historical narratives with layered materials. As a first-generation immigrant artist feeling a sense of dislocation, nostalgia, assimilation, and desire for belonging, my art, situated between chaos and order, emotion and meditation, and isolation and community, navigates the complex and often uncharted terrain of the displacement. It serves as a record of my “action of weaving and carving,” converted into a path, where I choose the departure, but the wind and the current decide the destination.

The Walk Slowly series which emerged from a shift in my art practice due to two uterine diseases in 2003 is a cathartic pilgrimage, inspired by my father’s metalsmith legacy. Initially, I started hand weaving metal wire with no intention to create art, contemplating physical and emotional turmoil through the spiral forms. This labor-intensive repetition led me to flow with medium, conform to the process, and stay present in the moment. The Gil (Path) series features an infinite, tangled Möbius strip. Uncovering a new passage through digging the negative space in stone, the very negative space becomes a pathway-a tangible representation of time’s passage within the strata. Removing superfluity, only necessity remains.

Viewing the repetitive, subtractive, and additive crafts accompanied by harmonic glossolalia (speaking in tongues associated with Pentecostal and charismatic traditions) as a physical pathway for the soul, I explore the ongoing struggle about the human condition and salvation. The wait for an answer, feeling like an endless war against time or dreaming, enlightens me that my artistic journey is more than a personal struggle—it’s a calling, a trial that transcends spacetime with aspirations for redemption. The war is within, with no shortcuts where the true meaning of surrender is understood only when fully spent.