Tailed Landscape: 우태경
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Press Release Text
Woo works under the title Parasitic Painting. Her daily life, the online world she enters each day, and the images around her act as hints. She settles into these sources and, from within them, builds the landscapes and paintings she wants to see.
A key trait of her practice is the use of both oil paint and digital print in the same work. She began using digital prints in her paintings after seeing her sister’s digital illustration work, which opened up new possibilities for her own practice. The print captures an impression from the digital world, while the painting extends that impression through her senses and creates a self-generating image. She calls it “parasitic” because she prints parts of existing images and then expands and multiplies them by following the information inside those fragments.
The artist believes that painting which “feeds on” given images mirrors her own life and attitude. Woo longs into the online world every day and relies on it. As a woman and young person, she often finds herself depending on men or on parents. These can seem passive or negative, but she faces them honestly and turns them into the way she makes her work. She also believes that many paintings and artworks grow from and depend on everything around them. Her work openly shows this attitude and asks how such a way of living can appear in painting.
In her early attempts, she used casual snapshots from her daily life. Now she collects images drifting online, prints them, and creates new images through her own method. Although her work uses online images and prints, it is not digital work, nor does it aim to show digital technique. She uses them as tools. Through oil painting, she alters and tests these images and pushes painting outward. As she builds images, she brings in traits she notices in our daily and virtual lives; divided days across online and offline spaces, the fragments of life shown on social media, images that show only a part while hiding the whole, and the way we imagine the whole from these pieces. These traits appear in her work.
Her “parasitic” attitude toward printed images also takes shape in the painting itself. Colours and forms that grow from the printed fragments collide with other fragments, break apart, link together, push through, or cover one another. The visual elements do not come from her personal style but from the senses carried by the fragments. When print and oil paint settle together on the canvas they create images that have mutated through their contact.
In this way the printed images, already fragmented or partial, having lost their original wholeness, are reproduced as basic elements of line, shape, and colour. The oil painting, drawn on top of these prints, “feeds” on them and extends outward, following the prints while producing abstract images whose outcomes cannot be fully predicted. The boundary between what is print and what is oil paint becomes unclear, as they harmonise on the canvas. This shows the interconnectedness of relationships and the closeness between elements.
The resulting images are landscapes seen and interpreted through her perspective constantly shifting and transforming according to the countless surrounding images.
