Woo Tae Kyung
Written by: Lev AAN (Art critic)
Title: Implication and Excess: A Pictorial Galaxy that Multiplied from the Digital Constellation
We connect stars that glitter in the night sky and weave stories into constellations. Woo Tae Kyung links small digital image fragments to make a physical surface and develops pictorial narratives. In space, a myriad of starlight penetrating the immeasurable, infinite distance and reaching us is strung on a virtual thread and becomes stories. On the Internet, pieces of digital images that roam about various multilayered spaces with profound depth are sprinkled on Woo's canvas. Then, they proliferate and are connected to form a work of art. This is the birth of "constellations." Constellations are the symbol of the "structural" system of perception that is arbitrary and can always be newly connected to create new stories. Constellations in the night sky, on the Internet, and in art are formed this way. Woo joins digital constellations together and enables them to grow to spawn her painterly galaxy. The taste of the Internet community is grouped by the force of gravity and emotions, which are pushed and pulled by one another to multiply and comprise a pictorial galaxy.
Manifestation of images that drift on the Internet universe
Space and the Internet have many things in common. The night sky is the screen that lets you catch a glimpse of the universe, and the black screens of digital devices are the screens that reveal the world inside the Internet. Like the night sky broods countless stars, abundant stories and information ready to be illuminated are concealed inside the black screens on our digital devices. Just as anyone can randomly hook up stars in the night sky to invent new constellations and stories, anyone can retrieve infinite information from the flat black screen and connect them to make up stories as long as they have a digital device.
Woo begins her paintings by making digital constellations on the canvas. She makes the physical cosmos of digital images on canvas. To be more precise, she builds a galaxy of digital images. As there are various galaxies in space (it is estimated that there are over 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe), Woo selects innumerable images on the Internet space in various ways to compose a canvas. As such, you can say that galaxies made of different digital images are formed on every canvas. Interestingly, if stars twinkle in the pitch-black space, images collected and edited by Woo flaunt themselves on the pure white canvas as if they gleam in the light. Up to this point can be considered the stage before the leap or the digital galaxy that is in development. The digital galaxy matures into the painterly galaxy with the physical movement of the painter, pulling and releasing the muscles and tendons in the real world that stink of turpentine and oil paint. As if attaching stars to make constellations, Woo multiplies and relates images on canvas to produce diverse constellations of images. The pictorial galaxy completed this way contains a wide spectrum of intertwined and overlapped constellations and abundant stories told by constellations, shapes, and implications.
Thus, Woo Tae Kyung's works can be primarily divided into two groups. Nonphysical, digital work in the first half of the process and physical painting in the second half of the process. The first half of the process begins with collecting digital images. For her early works, she used photos she took with her phone, but later collected images through search engines like NAVER (the largest search engine in Korea) and Google. Today, she chooses and saves images she finds on social media. Images she compiled go through digital editing. In this stage, they are cut and become fragmented to ultimately lose their narrative. Then, she randomly places these diverse pieces of images that lost their story and prints them on the canvas. In doing so, free, flexible, immaterial, nonphysical image data that were easily edited and deleted are transformed into material, physical printed images that are fixed and difficult to edit or delete. Virtual images that only exist as data are converted into real-world images that you can touch with your hands. From the moment the digital images are printed on the canvas, physical drawing begins, the vital and the second half of the process. She uses image fragments placed randomly across the canvas as coordinates to paint elements in the images in the exact style while multiplying and scaling them up (proliferation). Each image becomes relevant to other images by imitating, contrasting, connecting, and forming layers to develop multilayered digital constellations. This leads to the birth of a painterly galaxy that even Woo herself could not foresee as the painter.
Implication: Senses of image pieces
Small pieces of images Woo spread on canvas resemble starlight. Space is filled with planets, but what we see is the light reflected from the planets or the lights they emit: Starlight. This is why we cannot understand the planets just by observing the starlight. Starlight is the mere implication of the planet floating in space. Likewise, you cannot see the entirety of the image just by looking at the fragments Woo places on the canvas. Like how people make new stories by linking the starlight in the sky, Woo paints different image pieces to reveal their unique features and connects the partial images to form a new abstract shape. The work completed this way, however, does not look unfamiliar. The reason is that the images she collects come from the Internet that we are familiar with. Although images have lost their original narratives, the atmosphere remains in place, implying a story and awakening our subconscious senses.
She first introduced this process of amassing digital images, printing them on canvas, and painting by using them as coordinates in Parasitic Painting (2012–2014). She painted this by randomly fragmenting the images from her daily life on her phone and placing them on the canvas. She added the word "parasitic" for this because Parasitic Painting was about "expanding and proliferating the given information (image pieces)" (Woo's painting notes). In a word, the painting was a process of becoming parasitic on fragmented images. Afterward, she painted Tail Landscape (2015–2017), in which she compiled images of "a long list of hashtags (#) that never seemed to end," placed them on canvas, and painted a physical painting based on that image. The steps required to paint Tail Landscape involved clicking hashtags under Instagram images to collect images and clicking hashtags under those collected images to move to the next set of images. As a result, inconsistent photos were gathered by clicking hashtags as Woo followed her stream of consciousness. Based on the images she collected, she painted the physical painting. In Tail Landscape, Woo breaks away from her early works where she used images saved in her smartphone and, instead, takes photos from the Internet space like the collective unconscious (Carl Jung), social media in particular, where people share their tastes and cultures to invoke a stronger sense of déjà vu and universal sentiment. Her work does not feel foreign to viewers because parts of images imbued with senses that the loose Internet community share among them and expressions that grow out of the images fill the canvas. Notwithstanding fragments of images, the intrinsic feelings of the images still remain, so the canvas where these images have proliferated implies the original images before they were torn apart.
After painting Tail Landscape, she unveiled Painting of Drawings (2018–2020) she made by gathering images she searched using the keyword "drawing." Whereas her previous works started off from real-world images in photos, Painting of Drawings reveals the painterly sensitivity as it departs from images of drawings. In parallel, she worked on Landscape Painting (2016–2019), a visual compilation of tourist attraction photos she found online while preparing to travel herself around the same time. They expose the change in her painting process from an assemblage of inconsistent images, as seen in Tail Landscape, to that of special-purpose images. Her painting process has entered the next level. Even so, her paintings retain the same characteristics observed in Tail Landscape, albeit somewhat different, in the title of paintings made by combining words that come to mind following the stream of her consciousness (i.e., The Swaying of Lines Provoked Anxiety as if I Were Drifting Around, The Blazing of a Transparent Tyrannosaurus that Transforms into a Disastrous Ghost, Energy Beyond a Leopard__'__s Memory, and A Voyage Under Shattering Starlight over the Melody of a Red Heart).
In recent years, Woo has been experimenting diversely. She is working on the P Painting (since 2021) series, where P stands for "parasitic" and "potential" to suggest the trait of "being parasitic and affected by the digital environment" and having potential powers. She is also working on the Homi (since 2022) series made by searching and compiling images of painting media in the same context using keywords, oil painting, gouache, charcoal, colored pencils, etc. She is also painting the Twins (since 2020) series (i.e., Entangled Things Leaning Against a Pink Mountain Range, A Crow Flying Over the Sunset Sea Towards a Woman, From the Wind of a Bow to Leaves Under the Waves, and Iris in Blue Lights) where two canvas boards with the same allocation of digital images are physically painted differently. Because her physical painting is arbitrary and improvisational, the Twins series produce different results even though they begin from the same starting point. That is not all. She has also been producing the Series (since 2021) series (i.e., NtueOneday, NwedFirst, NwedReader, KthuCharlotte, and KsatWalkthrough). The Series pivots around pieces of webtoon (Internet comics) images she collected from a webtoon series or images recommended by the algorithm, among other methods. The most interesting of her works are Series3 and Series3-1 (2022), which blend the format used in Twins and Series and disclose the qualities of digital images and oil painting. They are also a series of twin paintings that start by locating identical pieces of webtoon images. What is interesting is that one of the twin paintings is an oil painting ("Series3") while the other is a digital painting (Series3-1). Woo's works are characterized by intersecting the digital and the real world, and it is not too much to say that they highlight this distinctive feature better than anything else.
Excess: Multiplication, proliferation, and relationship-building of image pieces
The proliferation of image bits is a vital element in completing Woo's works as a pictorial galaxy. A white digital galaxy becomes the galaxy packed with paintings, where whiteness disappears at last through multiplication and proliferation of physical expressions. Her expressions are very fluid. She keeps the format and the feelings emanated by fragmented images while multiplying and expanding them physically. She infects the canvas with her physical expressions that are "parasitic" on the shreds of images. In the process, she does not cling to her exclusive expression. If so, does this mean her works are not unique and roam here and there instead of settling on some qualities? Not at all. The arbitrary placement of fragmented images picked from a collection of images makes her works stand out and reveals the artist's differentiated expressions in the physical process of weaving the images together. She turns to her extraordinary expression in handling scraps of images, but they are not irrelevant to the artist herself. It is because the process of selecting and compiling numerous images circulating on the Internet, breaking them into small pieces, choosing which image to print, and arranging the chosen images on the canvas can never be completely arbitrary. The artist's taste and ability to create visual composition are inevitably reflected in the process. Her habit of expressing something in a certain manner, preferred vibes, overlapping of layers, and the visual composition intervenes from time to time as she multiplies and proliferates shreds of images. The artist's unique style permeates her works little by little. As such, even if she makes physical expressions based on bits of images, the process helps build her own painterly galaxy.
What is worth noting here is an excessive expression of images as she multiplies and proliferates them. The multiplication of fragmented images is not all there is to it. They take a step further and form relationships with other image fragments around them. The significance of such relationship-building goes beyond the meaning embedded in image pieces. Just as connecting stars marks the beginning of a new story, the multiplication and proliferation of images tie them together, create layers, cause incidents, and form a new visual narrative. The familiar feelings shared among the Internet community come to us as abstract shapes constantly oscillating between the digital realm and the real world.
Woo's works are always packed with dangers and filled with questions because "you can't predict how the outcome would look like" (painting notes). This is why her works are always in progress. They have an open ending. Looking at Woo's paintings, we can draw our own constellations as we please. Her works constitute a galaxy. They come together to create Woo Tae Kyung's universe. Even now, the galaxy is still being created.
A solo exhibition Between Square and Square, Gallery Chosun, 2022
Korean-English Translation of this book(or text etc) is supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts Management Service'
Press release courtesy Gallery Chosun.
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