Painting of Drawings: 우태경

Gallery Chosun hosted Painting of Drawings, a solo exhibition of the work of Woo Tae Kyung, from 29 July 2020 to 20 August 2020. Woo borrows images that focus on cellphones and the web, and uses these subjects as materials for her work, and he poses questions about the meaning of contemporary art, particularly in relation to where the barriers between the virtual realm and reality have been collapsed. For her second solo exhibition at Gallery Chosun, Woo presented 20 paintings, beginning with her series on fragments of drawings on the web, which were completed through her unique processing methods.

In her first solo exhibition in 2015, titled Parasitic Painting, the artist featured artworks that parasitized the photographs in her cellphone. Here, she printed parts of these photographs at intervals on the canvas. The prints were of a small size, and she completed her paintings by spontaneously filling the spaces between the images with oil paint. For her solo exhibition Tail Landscape at Gallery Chosun in 2017, she used a similar method, but she also found in social media the inspiration for a different method of expression. She borrowed keywords from hashtags on social media and printed related images in a small size all over the canvas. Once again, she filled the spaces between the images with oil paint and featured the paintings thus created. Her paintings were often described as “post-internet painting” and “digital-era painting,” and they have been mentioned as in relation to the global contemporary trend of painting that has naturally emerges from within the generation of artists acclimated to the internet.

For this exhibition, the artist continued her previous interests while at the same time focusing on the idea of appropriating ‘anonymous’ drawing. The internet is not only filled with photographs, but also with a large variety of drawings made by different people. The artist borrows from these drawings and draws her own in a similar manner. Since the original creations were themselves drawings, the paintings in the exhibition feel much more “painterly.” But the telltale signs that some elements were printed reveal the underlying mechanical process, and in her work, these serve as a point of interest in identifying the relations and differences between the printed elements and painted elements.

The exhibition underwent an interesting transition from the 7th of August. At this point the artist shifted the arrangement of certain pieces and thus changed the landscape of her exhibition. In consequence, repeat visitors from the 8th of August and onward will find themselves visiting an exhibition for which the layout has been changed. Some paintings that had been set at an angle, with the corner pointing to the top, will be set upright, and paintings that had been hung upright might be set at an angle. Paintings that had been grouped together might be spread apart, and the spaces between the paintings might be adjusted. The artist found it interesting how the people who arranged her work at the exhibitions would judge the direction of a work based on the captions on the rear even though she does not specify a top and bottom of her work. Hence this time, she wanted to change around the arrangement of her work in the middle of the exhibition.

Another characteristic that distinguished this exhibition from Woo’s prior exhibitions is the inclusion of paintings with rather lengthy titles. While her earlier work either belonged to a series or were simply left untitled, this exhibition includes works with lengthy titles that are similar to riddles, such as The Golden Drawing Diary of a Beautiful Boy Old Man (2018). The title is a list of words that came to mind as Woo examined the drawings that she referred to for each painting. The images are not related, and so the title naturally takes the form of a nonsensical riddle.

This form of title, in its fragmented linkage, resembles how we communicate on social media. On the surface of this new generation of media, it appears as if we are all interconnected, but in truth, we communicate in fragments through our own remote feeds. Woo’s brushstrokes, floating between the drawings that emerged through different people’s feeds visualize this mode of communication while at the same time pose a question in regards to what is the appropriate form of painting in a world where this mode of communication has become the norm.