On Minjung Woo's solo exhibition Carving the moon's surface
Inseon Kim, director of Space Willing N Dealing
Minjung Woo begins her work by spreading a thin, uniform layer of watery mud across a wooden plank. A few days later, after the mud has dried, the plank's surface appears as a completely desiccated, hardened wall. Woo incises lines of chipped mud across this wall, leaving marks—thick or thin, shallow or deep—that reflect the amount of force transferred through the artist's gesture. She hears every scratch and feels every chip as the plank's surface responds to the pressure of her hand and the tip of her pick; it is not uncommon for Woo to become completely immersed in the conversation between her body and the vibrations that tickle her fingertips. Woo's solo exhibition, which opens at Gallery Chosun on July 9, 2020, presents several distinct series: I assume (2019-2020), consisting of line paintings on scratched dirt walls; I Tried (2019-2020), in which she experiments with overlapping and juxtaposing images on the surfaces of her scratched wall paintings; and vinaida, vinaida (2020), a new video artwork. Throughout Woo's oeuvre, the dirt walls that she creates function as the conceptual bedrock of her creative efforts. As she herself has stated, the I assume series depicts a lunar surface. The face of the moon is never the same; as it waxes and wanes, the veil of dark night slips away to reveal a pale landscape of glowing light. This fickle visage creates a dual impression of impassive stillness and constant flux. The scratch marks on the dirt walls of I assume are reminiscent of shallow relief sculptures. Such an unconventional technique, which the artist painstakingly undertakes by engraving variable lines with a pick, heightens each work's sense of materiality by nakedly displaying the residual marks of Woo's creativity. These scratch marks serve as reminders of the artist's action, allowing viewers to imagine the sensory stimuli registered by the artist's body during the process of creation. The scratched surfaces of her paintings therefore suggest a physical memory—a resonance with the vibrations that reverberate through Woo's hands as she works. I Tried is consists of images of striking vitality within dynamic compositions painted on hwaseonji, a traditional Korean painting paper. Woo mainly deploys organic shapes that are full of life and curves in her depictions of various subjects—a wide, arching line framing a gigantic human face that fills the painting surface; acrobatic human bodies laid out in repetitive, regular compositions; abstract figures reminiscent of natural elements such as plants, water, fire, and wind—all of which harmonize on the painted surface. Overall, Woo attempts to magnify the vitality of her subjects through duplicating, overlapping, and connecting curved lines. Her preference for curves contrasts sharply with the hard, fixed materiality of her substrate. Even when natural imagery is not present in her works, Woo insists on incorporating curvilinear forms in the architectural elements that she repeatedly includes in her compositions. This is evidenced by the rounded, hollowed out windows derived from Indian architecture that she repeatedly renders in her paintings. "When I first started my wall scratching paintings, I wanted to scrape a fissure into the wall and escape through it. I wanted to be able to talk to the wall through the open scratch, to understand it. To me, drawing was an act of creating openings and dragging color through them... A finished dirt wall can feel cool or warm to the touch. Every living thing, including me, originates from the earth and to the earth it shall return" (Excerpt from author's notes). Transforming powdered dirt into a smooth, vertical surface amounts to the creation of a device capable of firmly recording and preserving the artist's every creative gesture. For Woo, drawing is not merely a simple act of recording. As she has noted, these hardened and immobile wall surfaces actually constitute a flow of unending, vital dynamism; her walls attempt to emulate both the microscopic and macroscopic orders of existence. The moon serves as the axis of the universe in Woo's works and the images that she scratches across the lunar surface manifest a self-contained world of creation, transformation, and annihilation. Viewers can thus locate the artist and the minute fissures of her attempts at conversing with the universe. In doing so, the writhing, scratched curves of the dirt wall come to represent the repeated randomness of life itself. Vinaida, vinaida, the artist's first performance video installation, conveys a record of passionate movements by documenting the transformation of a soap sculpture; as the artist handles the soap and it slowly decreases in size, the process mimics Woo's previous efforts to create empirical images by scratching images into a dirt wall. The act of scouring the physical surface of a dirt wall, which constitutes Woo's creative expression, is reframed in a demonstration of her deliberate intent in a clear and practical manner. In the process of destroying the soap figurine, however, she experiences an emotional disturbance that transcends the object's physical transformation. This can be attributed to the fact that the soap sculpture is actually a representation of herself; as she gradually rubs away its mass with her hands she beholds the slow annihilation of her own face, and thus internalizes a sense of longing and aching tragedy that accompanies the understanding that all things must disappear in the course of time. Such an unexpected emotional experience ultimately offers an opportunity to contemplate her creative process of expanding the possibilities of the cracks and fissures she creates. A self-reliant vitality permeates Woo's techniques and experiments. When multiple works overlap, they create a diversity of experiences that she records in her wall scratches. The distillation of experience evinced in her wall paintings suggests further transformations, further expansions, and the marks she leaves behind bear witness to the artist's memories, perceptions, and bursts of ephemeral emotion. As she scratches, touches, and transforms these dirt walls, they assume significance as more than mere marks; instead, they have the potential to burst into flames of vitality, something that viewers now seek to perceive in the endless and unpredictable growth of Woo's oeuvre.
Korean-English Translation of this text is supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts ****
Press release courtesy Gallery Chosun.
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