Between square and square: 우태경
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Press Release Text
Author: Lev AAN (Art Critic)
Title: Hint and Excess: A Painted Galaxy Growing in a Digital Constellation
We link the bright stars in the night sky and build stories from them. In the same way, Woo Taekyung links small digital image fragments to form a physical surface and a painted narrative. Starlight that has traveled across unthinkable distances is tied together with imagined lines and becomes a single story. Digital image fragments drifting through the deep, layered space of the internet scatter across Woo’s canvas, multiply, intertwine, and become a work of art. This is the birth of a “constellation”.
A constellation is an image of a flexible system of thought; one that can always be rearranged to create new stories. In this way, constellations appear in the night sky, across the internet, and in art. Woo Taekyung connects and grows a digital constellation to form a painting world of her own. The tastes of online communities gather under the pull of the artist’s sensibility, and within that field they push, pull, burst, and multiply, shaping a painted galaxy.
Images Wandering Through the Internet Universe – Made Visible
The universe and the internet share many traits. The night sky is a screen that shows the universe, and the dark display of a digital device is a screen that opens onto the internet. Just as the night sky holds countless stars, the dark display holds countless stories and bits of information waiting to light up. Anyone can draw new constellations and stories by linking stars, and with a digital device, anyone can summon endless information onto a flat black screen and link it to create new stories.
Woo begins by forming a digital cosmos on her canvas. She builds a physical universe of digital images. More precisely, she creates a galaxy of digital images. As the universe holds many kinds of galaxies — astronomers guess there are more than 170 billion in the observable universe — she selects countless images from the internet universe in various ways and forms a single canvas from them. Each canvas becomes its own digital-image galaxy.
The interesting part is this: if stars shine in the pitch-black universe, the images Woo gathers and edits glitter on a bright white canvas. Up to this moment, her work is in a stage just before a leap, a digital galaxy being formed. This digital galaxy becomes a painted galaxy through the artist’s physical gestures; stretching and easing her muscles, amid the smell of turpentine and oil paint. As one links stars to form constellations, she magnifies and connects the images on the canvas so they can relate to each other, forming many constellations of images. In the finished painted galaxy, these intertwined and layered constellations hold many stories, shapes, and meanings that radiate from them.
Thus, Woo’s work can be divided into two main parts. The first is a non-physical digital process, and the second is a physical painting process.
The first part begins with collecting digital images. In her early work, she used photos she took with her phone. Later she gathered images through search engines like Naver and Google, and now she selects and collects images through social media. These images then go through her digital process, where they are broken apart and fragmented, losing their original story. She arranges these story-stripped fragments at will and prints them onto a canvas.
By doing this, free-flowing digital image data, easy to copy, edit, and delete, takes on a fixed, material form that is hard to change. A virtual image that once existed only as data becomes a physical image you can touch. Once the digital images are printed on the canvas, the core of the work begins: the physical act of painting.
Using the randomly placed fragments as coordinates, she grows and amplifies each image by following its visual style, and she builds links among the fragments through similarity, contrast, connection, layering, and other methods. Through this, Woo creates a layered digital constellation. Out of this process comes a painted galaxy that even the artist could not predict beforehand.
Hint: The Sensation of Fragmented Images
The small image fragments Woo Taekyung scatters around the canvas are like starlight. The universe is full of planets, but what we see is only the light they reflect or emit; starlight. That light cannot tell us what those planets truly look like. It only hints at their presence. In the same way, the fragments placed on her canvas do not reveal the full form they once belonged to. Yet as we link points of starlight in the night sky to make new stories, she draws out the traits of each fragment and connects them to form new abstract shapes.
The result feels new, but not strange. That is because the images she collects come from the familiar world of the internet. Their narrative has been stripped away, but their atmosphere remains. It suggests a story and stirs our unconscious senses.
In her series Parasitic Painting (2012 - 2014), she began printing digital images on canvas and using them as coordinates for painting. For the work, she cut up everyday photos stored on her phone, arranged the pieces on canvas, and painted from them. She used the word “parasitic” because the work “expands and multiplies by following the given information (the fragments)” (artist’s note). In short, the painting “feeds on” the fragments.
After that, she moved to the series Tail Landscape (2015 - 2017), in which she collected images linked by “hashtags”, each one leading to the next. She gathered images by following the chains of hashtags on Instagram. Jumping from one image to another without a fixed logic, like stream of consciousness, and making physical paintings based on them.
Tail Landscape moved beyond her early use of images stored on her own phone. It reached into the internet as a kind of collective unconscious, especially social media spaces where people share taste and culture, and brought out images that carried a stronger sense of déjà vu and common feeling. Her paintings do not feel unfamiliar because the fragments she uses, and the forms that grow from them, hold the sensibility of these loose online communities.
Even as fragments, the essential feeling of the original images remains, so the painted forms that grow from them hint at the source images that existed before they were broken apart.
After the Tail Landscapes series, Woo presented Painting of Drawings (2018 - 2020), made by collecting images found through the keyword “drawing”. While her earlier work began with the realism of photographs, this series began with drawn images and showed an even richer painterly sensitivity. Around the same time, as she prepared for a trip, she gathered travel photos found online and created the Landscape Painting series (2016 - 2019). These works show a shift from the unfocused image collecting of Tail Landscape to collecting images with a clear purpose. Her process had entered a new stage. Even so, after Painting of Drawings, she continued to title her works by stringing together words that surfaced in a stream of consciousness — <Lines Fluttering Felt as Restless as Drifting>, <The Glare of Clear Tyranno Morphing Into a Reaper>, <Energy Beyond the Leopard’s Memory>, <A Voyage of Starlight Breaking Over a Red Heart Melody> — and so on. In this way, she kept the spirit of Tail Landscape alive in another form.
Recently, Woo has been exploring many directions. To express both “being influenced by digital environments” and “having potential and latent ability”, she began the P Painting series (2021-), named after the initials of “parasitic” and “potential”. In a similar spirit, she has created series based on searching and collecting by keywords for traditional art materials such as oil paint, gouache, charcoal, and coloured pencil (2022)/
She is also working on Twins (2020 - ), in which two canvases share the same digital image layout but are painted differently by hand (i.e. <Things Tangled While Leaning on Pink Mountains>, <A Crow Flying Toward a Woman Above a Sunset Sea>, <From the Wind of a Bow to Leaves in the Waves>, <Iris in Bright Blue Light> and others). Because her physical painting methods are spontaneous and intuitive, these twin works begin in the same place but end in different results.
Another ongoing series is Series (2021 - ), based on fragments taken from webtoons; images pulled from a single serialised comic, or images recommended by algorithms, collected through various paths. The most striking work combines the formats of Twins and Series, revealing both digital and oil techniques at once: <Homi> (2022). Like Twins, it begins with two identical layouts of webtoon fragments, but in this case, one canvas is rendered in oil paint, and the other is created digitally in Clip Studio. Her work often crosses digital and physical realms, and this twin-piece makes that trait more visible than ever.
Excess: Amplifying, Multiplying, and Connecting Fragmented Images
The multiplication of fragments is the key to how Woo Taekyung’s work becomes a painted galaxy. The white digital galaxy turns into a galaxy filled with paint only when physical expression has expanded and multiplied across the surface. Her way of painting is highly fluid. She keeps the look and feel of each fragment and extends it physically, letting her brushwork “feed on” the fragments and spread across the canvas.
In doing so, she does not cling to a fixed personal style. Does that mean her work drifts without identity, lacking a clear voice? Not at all. The way she gathers digital images and places the fragments, both done freely yet guided by her eye, already gives the work a unique feeling. And in the physical process of weaving those fragments together, her own expressive instincts appear again and again.
She relies on the fragments, yet they are not separate from her. Her choices shape them at every step: when she selects images from the vast stream online, when she cuts them into fragments, when she decides which ones to print, and when she places them on the canvas. None of these decisions are ever purely random. Her taste and her sense for visual structure inevitably show through.
As she amplifies and multiplies the fragments, her habits, preferred moods, ways of layering, and sense of composition take part moment by moment. Her presence slips into the work bit by bit. So even though she adjusts her physical expression to each fragment, the result still forms a painted galaxy that belongs to her alone.
What stands out the most is the sense of excess that appears as she amplifies and multiplies the fragments. Their growth never ends with simple expansion. It moves toward forming relationships with nearby fragments. These links go beyond anything contained in the fragments’ original meanings. As stars form new stories when joined, the expansion and multiplication of images tie them together, build layers, trigger events, and shape a new visual narrative. The familiar feelings once shared by online communities reach us again through this excess, now vibrating between the digital and the physical abstract form.
Her work is always risky and full of questions because, as she writes in her notes, “I can never predict how the result will turn out”. Her process is always ongoing and ends with an open conclusion. As we look at her work, we can draw our own constellations. Each piece is a galaxy, and together they form her universe. A universe still growing even now.
