Woo, Min Jung

Minjung Woo

Minjung Woo graduated in 2010 from Seoul National University with degrees in Painting and Industrial Design, and in 2017, she majored in Painting at the same university's graduate school.

Minjung Woo has built her work world while learning techniques and having an interest in surface effects using clay. She creates clay panels and uses them as a boundary with the world, repeatedly carving and coloring them to convey her intended stories. These stories deal with the boundaries between reality and ideals, the transiency and the eternity, and the struggle of living in between.

Early Works

From her early series "The Great Escape" (2015), Minjung Woo has continued her interest in walls and murals, which serve as boundaries between reality and ideals, and as mediums that hint at other dimensions. Through experiments applying mural techniques to architectural panels, She explores both the actual space and what lies beyond.

Major Works

Beheaded (2016)

The "Beheaded" series is where Minjung Woo began to fully utilize mural techniques, applying clay to panels and carving it off to create images. Inspired by the headless Buddha statues commonly found in the Gyeongju region, this series connects her work to religious murals such as tombs and Buddhist paintings from China, Mongolia, and India. The boundary between the moment and eternity, reality and ideals, is represented by the fluctuating waves carved on the wall.

Nevertheless (2017)

The series "Nevertheless" is about the wills that rise vertically from the ground despite the dissonance between reality and ideals. It speaks of living with hope, dying, and the will to live despite everything.

Sing for Eric (2018)

Minjung Woo's stories and works continue to expand, and "Sing for Eric" extends the narrative to a universal human story encompassing the East and West, about the transiency and the eternity, what disappears and what remains solid. "Sing for Eric" borrows its form from Disney's animation "The Little Mermaid," capturing the ephemeral nature of a crashing wave that turns into foam. Meanwhile, this work uses deformed panels, not just images carved into a square frame, but panels that resemble preserved forms of waves.

Surmising (2019-2020), I TRIED (2019-2020)

The "Surmising" series is a more actively colored work on a clay-coated panel, depicting the surface of the moon. The moon, which constantly changes its appearance according to its phases yet holds its place, symbolizes change, stasis, and repetition. The "I TRIED" series is created by pressing charcoal onto screens painted multiple times with base colors and then gilded. The work begins to feature figures that appear to show a series of movements, illustrating change and movement.

BER (2021)

The "BER" series features the motif of consecutive movements that began appearing in the "I TRIED" series. Through this, the series depicts the acts, attempts, and efforts of people that persist every day, along with the moments that shine. In the process of creating the "BER" series, the artist produced diagrams that intertwined the stories of her work with icons such as fire, bees, and stars.

Eggs, Rocks, and Shards (2022), OIC (2022)

The modified frames of the "Sing for Eric" series also appear in the "Eggs, Rocks, and Shards" and "OIC" series. The "OIC" series visualizes the syllables 'O', 'I', 'C' converted into Morse code, depicting long and short sounds.

Awards and Selections

Minjung Woo has participated in residency programs such as Suwo Art Studio PUREUNJIDAE CHANGJAK SAEMTEO(Suwon, 2022), Niv Art Center (New Delhi, India, 2019), and Yeompo Art Studio (Ulsan, 2017). She has been selected for the ARKO Young Artist Debut Support (Arts Council Korea, 2022), 5th Gwangju Hawru Artist Exhibition of 10 Artists Grand Prize (2021), 2020 Zaha Artist Project (Zaha Museum, 2020), 2019 New Discos Selected Artists Exhibition Grand Prize (Cyart Space, 2018), 2017 Gyeomjae Jeongseon Artist of Tomorrow (Gyeomjae Jeongseon Museum of Art, 2017).

Exhibitions

Minjung Woo's major solo exhibitions include "BER" (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2022), "Pastry" (Zaha Museum, Seoul, 2020), " Carving the Moon's Surface" (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2020), "Dust that Did Not Disappear" (Cyart Space, Seoul, 2019), and "The Wall Flows, The Moment is Stuffed" (Space Mandeok, Busan, 2017).

Major group exhibitions include "Try, Try" (Prompt Project, Seoul, 2022), "Circuit Seoul #2 Omnipresent" (Loop Station Ikseon, Seoul, 2022), "10 to the Nth power" (Culture Station Seoul 284 TMO, Seoul, 2020), "IGNOU Road" (NIV Art Center, New Delhi, India, 2019), "The 8th Gyeomjae Jeongseon Artist of Tomorrow" (Gyeomjae Jeongseon Museum of Art, Seoul, 2017), "2017 Degree Show" (MoA, Seoul, 2016), and "Korean Aesthetic Consciousness and Its Expression" (Chosun Ilbo Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016).