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By Mark Amery

Providing big, bright and interactive exhibits have proven successful in boosting museum visitor numbers. City Gallery’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition in 2009 achieved almost record attendance for the gallery.

Down south, Dunedin Public Art Gallery has just reported its highest attendance numbers for a financial year since it opened in 1884. That’s due largely, it’s reported, to a new children’s playspace and interactive exhibitions by Olafur Eliasson and Korean-New Zealand artist Seung Yul Oh. The survey of 10 years of Oh’s practice is now at City Gallery Wellington.

Galleries need to also work harder on ways to engage new audiences in less easy work. I write on a visit to San Francisco, where it’s rare for galleries to not provide children’s areas and highly visible activity programmes. Institutions like the astonishing Exploratorium are 100 per cent hands-on. For four decades here artists have been commissioned to create interactive work that explains scientific principles. There’s many a machine that, with a shimmer and a wobble reminds you of Len Lye’s appeal back home. More on travels in a later column.

With Oh add bounce to big and bright. Fun and playful sculptures, squeezing and testing spaces and viewers, several of the inflatable works extend ideas we’re more familiar with in the fairground. Play is integral to the work’s activation. While that’s true of all robust artwork – it requires our imaginative stretching and testing – with Oh it’s physical or visceral. Like Eliasson there’s an interest in charging up elemental participatory experiences in a space.

Oh explores how sculpture might be extended by interaction with a space and with ourselves. A forest of yellow finger-like pillars can be pushed through and yield to our pressure. A ginormous bean-bag, when jumped into, becomes a mountain you have to work hard collectively to surmount. Artists push things to break new ground. Seung Yul Oh’s explores the space just before things topple or pop. How far should you push things?

There’s a small charge of danger, violence even. From outside its installation the video work The Ability To Blow Themselves Up can sound like gunfire. This ongoing work of Oh’s features film of balloons a person is blowing up exploding in their face. As with the beanbag, hysterical delight meets alarm at meeting something bigger than us. There’s disturbance in the film’s excessive rapidity, much as Oh’s gleaming, swollen plastic forms speak as much of an obese culture of over-consumption as they they feel pregnant with joy and potential. In a small room nearby, dangles a giant match from the ceiling in one corner. In the other corner a small cartoon mouse, up on his hind legs, puts his hands out, either in alarm or exasperation. It is waiting for that match to light. Open to all possibilities we might infer. Perhaps the world might go up in smoke any minute.

There’s an interesting tension in an Oh survey, if confusing at times, between what work can and should be pushed, and what shouldn’t be touched. Oddooki, Seung’s bird-like egg creatures, need to be pushed to hear their internal bells ring. They work like a baby’s rattle, Oh reconnecting adults with base experiential human instincts.

My struggle with Oh’s work is that, while I enjoy the spare elegance of its design in interaction with its surroundings, the stimulation is brief. These eggs leave little beyond the experience. Even the beautiful and amusing totemic-like creatures Oddooki prove short for me on symbolism. When Seung places a giant beanbag in a room, he also projects onto the wall’s landscape, but the video ultimately proves forgettable and unnecessary. Likewise, the large inert wall paintings in the main auditorium. Oh extends our contemporary cultural environment into interesting new spaces (and maybe there’s a Korean cultural context I miss too) but I’m not changed by the work.

Seung Yul Oh's recent restaurant based works are the most rewarding in the show, bringing plastic noodle dishes (usually used to advertise real food) into the gallery as sculpture. Gleaming like shrines, and a form of still life, falls of noodles from chopsticks hanging high in the air evoke the performance we all undertake daily in eating, and the meditation it involves. Gleaming towers of trays and bowls, like his finger forest and Oddooki celebrate the joy and abundance of many together in conversation.

• Moamoa: A Decade, Seung Yul Oh, City Gallery Wellington until 24 August

MUST SEE

The show I wish I was in Wellington to see. Stark and sinister looking instruments to conduct interrogation and surveillance by, with photographs, these three elegant and animated looking industrial-edged sculptural installations sees Roche reconfigure 1970s and 1980s works for new dark times.

• Interviews, Peter Roche, Bartley and Company, until 12 July.