Oscillating between digital and analogue, Korean-born Canadian artist Sun Woo's paintings employ symbols and signs prevalent in contemporary society and pop culture to enquire into the paradigms and desires that underlie the consumption and distribution of images.
Read MoreSun Woo was born in Seoul, where she lived until her move to Canada at the age of ten. Woo recalls, as a child, drawing water colour paintings of animals, visiting art exhibitions, and being read bedtime stories, all of which encouraged her to pursue art making.
Woo lived in Toronto for four years prior to attending Columbia University in New York. After graduating in 2017, Woo returned to Seoul, where she lives and works today.
Resulting from her itinerant upbringing, Woo's interest in pop culture grew with the time she spent watching television, listening to music, and catching up with friends on MSN, which eventually led to its incorporation into her practice.
Sun Woo begins her paintings by gathering images circulating on the internet and assembling them into Photoshop 'sketches', which often reference streetwear, K-pop, or video games as an enquiry into the psychological drives behind consumer culture.
Woo's 'Girls' series (2017—2018) explores the sexualisation of female bodies in K-pop across paintings that show alien-looking female figures with purple and green skin in revealing clothing. They are depicted brandishing dolls, as in Girl 4 (2017), or implanted with a winding key like a mechanical toy, as in Girl 5 (2018).
The figures in 'Girls' are rendered to resemble anime characters, drawing connections between Japanese and Korean cultures and the aesthetic strategies employed by both to market and circulate fetishised images of young women.
Log-in to Paradise (2019) is an acrylic painting that features a selection of imagery from video games, including flying sentinels, golden crosses, and spherical gadgets, across shades of iron reds and greens. A tube-like structure marked with the word 'paradise' appears to connect the two spheres within the painting, while a hand holding a phone in the lower left corner alludes to the digital realm.
In Take Me Someplace Heavenly (2020), a large-scale acrylic painting, a shrine-like structure of stacked sneakers, ranging from Balenciaga to Vans, is painted against an apocalyptic crimson sky. Two melting candles at the base of the structure hint at the culture of worship that surrounds brand names and streetwear.
Shown alongside other paintings from Woo's 2020 exhibition Wishing Well, I'm Your Genie (2020) depicts a small fairy flying over an open book, casting an illuminating spell over the pages. The painting hints at the transformation of objects and images as they are consumed and passed between between individuals and communities.
Sun Woo has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Wishing Well at Foundwill Arts Society, Seoul (2020), and group exhibitions include Fragment Gallery, Moscow (2021, 2020); Gallery Hussenot, Paris (2021); P21, Seoul (2020); Gallery Chosun, Seoul (2020); Harlesden High Street, London (2020); 36th Korea Galleries Art Fair (2018); and Leroy Neiman Gallery, New York (2017).
The artist's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2021
