Carving the moon's surface: 우민정

Gallery Chosun will present Woo Min Jung’s solo exhibition 《Carving the moon’s surface》 from July 9 to July 24, 2020. Although the artist trained in traditional Korean painting, she has explored a wide range of media and developed a distinctive practice of her own. Since 2013, after learning mural techniques, she has been creating clay panels, scraping and painting their surfaces to record the images and wishes drawn from her daily life. This exhibition features more than twenty new works that reflect her recent experiments and ongoing explorations. 

As the title 《Carving the moon’s surface》 suggests, the exhibition treats the surface of the paintings like the surface of the moon, exploring poetic effects that arise between what is distant and near, eternal and temporary, transcendent and ordinary. The surface; heavy and solemn like an ancient mural, contrasts with the light, lively images and lines that appear on it. While traditional murals were often meant to firmly fix people’s wishes onto a wall so they could be remembered and honoured for a long time, Woo Minjung’s murals feel more like an attempt to catch the fleeting quality of a moment or the movement of things that refuse to stay still. Rather than pulling viewers past the surface into a deeper scene, the exhibition encourages them to linger on the surface itself, to dwell on the small, temporary traces layered there and consider what they might mean.