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Visiting Impermanence: The art of microbiology at Gallery Elena Shchukina for New Scientist, <\/em>5 November 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n HALFWAY along a pleasant foot passage in London\u2019s exclusive Mayfair district, death is waiting, clad in motley both rich and strange.<\/p>\n On the ground floor of Gallery Elena Shchukina, it\u2019s gone gigantically viral. All around are deadly viruses blown into million-times-magnified life by a host of glassblowers under the close direction of UK artist\u00a0Luke Jerram<\/a>.<\/p>\n The academic and scientific community have been commissioning Jerram\u2019s flus and fevers for nearly a decade, but it\u2019s good to see them out of their scientific setting. Free from the sneaking suspicion that they illustrate some important medical point, these head-size viruses grow even more magnificently strange.<\/p>\n Jerram is the gallery\u2019s entry drug: downstairs there\u2019s something altogether darker \u2013 something that has festered for anywhere between a day and a year under the watchful eye of South Korean artist\u00a0Seung-Hwan Oh<\/a>.<\/p>\n Oh, who studied film and photography in New York before returning to his native Seoul, has found a way to corrupt photographic portraits by soaking them in baths infested with microbes of one sort or another. Penicillin is his favourite. Each species of bacteria metabolises the chemicals of a photograph in a different way: the men and women in Oh\u2019s solo portraits are variously cracked, bled, stained and ravaged \u2013 sometimes in beautiful ways.<\/p>\n More often they are ruined, their proportions and perspectives monstrously skewed. Beyond setting the initial conditions, Oh has no control over how his images will distort. Here, a man grows horns. There, some inner demon breaks through the tatters of a human face.<\/p>\n Quite what Oh means by all this isn\u2019t made clear. One senses he is still enraptured by the experiment for its own sake, and looked at this way, as a very advanced work-in-progress, the show \u2013 his first in London \u2013 does very nicely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting Impermanence: The art of microbiology at Gallery Elena Shchukina for New Scientist, 5 November 2015. HALFWAY along a pleasant foot passage in London\u2019s exclusive Mayfair district, death is waiting, clad in motley both rich and strange. On the ground … Continue reading <\/div>\n![\"New](\"https:\/\/images.newscientist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/dn28451-2_800.jpg?width=800\")
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