Student Art: Albert Ok

While working as a waiter and training as a sushi chef to pay off student loans, fourth-year studio art major Albert Ok creates paintings that touch subjects vast and minute, as microscopic as a blood cell and as general as physical labor.
One painting of Ok’s, which garnered immediate and intense reaction from his peers, is a bed sheet, stretched over a wooden frame. The lower half of the greenish-brown sheet is dotted with hundreds of small circles of various natural colors: brown, red and white.
His use of a bed sheet calls into consideration issues surrounding the body (since beds and blankets are associated with a host of ideas, including bodily function, bodily fluids, rest, rejuvenation, sin, nests, sex and death, among others), as do his uses of red wine and bleach to form the circles