Stretch out your arm.
Pick a spot—a vein, a mole, a strand of hair.
Lean in.
Even closer.
Focus on it until your vision blurs.
Notice things moving furtively over the translucent plain.
Perhaps it is your pores widening.
The cells multiplying.
The particles vibrating.
Vibrating, moving, colliding, merging.
With those in the air, in the plant on your windowsill, in your chair.
Feel the electricity emitting through your shoulder blades.
Is that fear rising inside? Is it bliss? Hope?
Imagine physically becoming one with anything. With your own cells, the body of your loved one, the green veins of your houseplants, the ground that you’re standing on, the air that you’re breathing. Imagine all artificial boundaries and thresholds—“life and death,” “man and woman,” “humans and nature,” “past and present,” “mundane and spiritual”—disintegrating and intermingling. It is a terrifying vision because we rely on boundaries and orders to make things intelligible. It may be a similar awe at facing the void before God created the world or at the seed of the universe before the Big Bang. Where you and I are indistinguishable. Where them and us are the same.
“When I’m immersed in painting, I feel the electricity flowing through my shoulders. You’re transported to that other dimension. It’s like being possessed,” said Woo Changhoon.
Yet, Woo’s otherworldly canvas is far from a surreal fantasy land or primordial chaos.
It is the same world that you and I inhabit as eating, sleeping, and loving humans.
Woo channels our daily world from a dimension we do not pause to feel. A dimension that is sometimes infinitesimal, others cosmic; a dimension that you need to be “possessed” to access.
An easy shorthand for Woo’s strangely captivating universe is the “quantum world” which has become both hip and familiar with dramatic time travels and cool physics (Mr. Nolan’s Interstellar and Oppenheimer). I am not complaining here. “I felt so lonely doing this kind of work alone back in the 80s. Now, I have young fans and other artists who are interested in my vision,” said Woo. The quantum trend has certainly made Woo’s works more recognizable. Or labelable.
But that label may leave you missing what Woo has tried to project for the past 40 devoted years.
How do you imagine a beyond-human realm as a human with limited sensory receptors? What sensations are stirred when you attempt such an absurd imagination?
How does this imagination guide you to live as a finite human?
A neat diagnosis such as “oh, this spiral represents the active movement of quanta” would bypass these fervent questions.
You can make Woo’s two-dimensional-but-not-two-dimensional (“multidimensional,” according to the artist) paintings utterly cerebral by viewing them as esoteric renditions of theoretical physics. But what does that mean to us as living, breathing humans brushing with other humans and non-humans?
Woo’s paintings show that these brushings may not be intellectually clear or even aesthetically pleasant. They are poignantly corporeal, electrifying, and weirdly human.
시간의 감각이 날카로울 때가 있다. 몸이 아플 때 특히 그렇다. […] 해오던 일을 모두 멈추고 통증을 견디는 동안, 한 방울씩 떨어져내리는 시간은 면도날을 뭉쳐 만든 구슬들 같다.
한강, 『흰』(Han Kang, The White Book)
In diamond-sharp prose, writer Han Kang talks about the trenchant edge of time that bodily pain makes her aware of. When an otherworldly pain hits, you become hyperaware of the workings of your physiology to its smallest tips. As you focus on this atomic dimension, time stretches. Each minute, second, and eventually time are elongated. Your pained body transports you to an alternate realm where time moves differently.
The triggered matters of your throbbing body charge through space, meeting in their course the matters forming your memories and other bodies. Time curves and spirals as if permeating your soft flesh.
If pain carries Woo unexpectedly to the matters’ dimension, he transports himself at will as well. The artist devoted decades since the 1970s to contemplating the “origin of the universe,” studying topology, quantum physics, and East Asian spiritual traditions. Such hermetic dedication yielded Woo a rare command over his mode of working. Through a brief period of intense concentration, Woo can get into an other-dimensional state where he channels the matter’s movements with his fingers as if “possessed.”
What he puts on canvas, says Woo, comes spontaneously on the spot. But this spontaneity sits on top of remarkable perseverance to get closer to the truth of everything. Throughout Woo’s early to mid-career, no one in the Korean art world resonated with his burning interest in such an obscure topic and bizarre half-abstract, half-figurative representations. He never belonged to any “schools.” He still doesn’t. Yet he persists, with an adamant belief that this is his calling as an artist. In his canvas, our world unfolds in a form closer to its origin. Its unexpected connections are revealed, inspiring weighted awe and curious exhilaration.
Woo has been conducting live painting sessions where he starts and finishes a piece in front of the viewers. “Each time, there’s different energy because people who come are different. I’m gathering that energy, which is why I can’t do this in an isolated studio. Being able to channel that energy, that chi…makes me infinitely grateful to the divine order.” The viewers contribute to the matter’s energy that Woo transmits live on canvas. The divide between the artist and passive viewers dissolves; they channel a painting, together.
It doesn’t matter when you go see Woo’s session since it is not about witnessing a painting getting done.
It is about the vibrations of you and your fellow beings reshaping the gallery space and ordinary time (“missed my morning coffee today,” “the subway was insanely crowded”), together.
[I]f humans are simply stupid creatures limited by our natures to experience events chronologically, would this mean that in physical reality we have no control over our lives, that we cannot be held responsible?
Meng Jin, Little Gods
The “origin of the universe” can seem so far removed from earthly affairs. What are relationships, love, or even empathy, against the essence?
They are where the essence leads you.
Woo’s life-long pursuit of the essence made him aware of his infinite entanglement with other beings, whether humans or non-humans, dead or alive. It is nearly impossible to fathom this chaotic mesh in the dry realm of mechanical reason. Incorporating everything, they are capacious and “sacred.”
It is one challenge to envision the “sacred” merging in the dimension that we live in; it is another to represent it. Exactly what should you put on canvas to show that connection?
Woo’s oeuvre reflects the artist’s long contemplation of this practical and very human question. His early works from the 80s and 90s gravitate toward the most prominent thresholds in our imagination of spirituality and essence, namely life and death, and noticeably conceptual subjects such as antimatter derived directly from theoretical physics.
Had Woo stayed with these fundamental yet rather predictable subjects, his works would not have been so gripping.
But Woo has evolved.
The initial preoccupation with abstract, borderline spaces shifted to tangible, ordinary ones including a marketplace and people working out in a gym, having a casual meal, or being in the heat of lovemaking. Woo must have realized that his choices of what he depicted were as arbitrary as the line between life and death. If matters reign free from the boundaries imposed by humans, why should he limit himself to subjects that humans assume are about boundaries? Matters are fluttering in moving treadmills and people exerting to lift 15 kilos of dumbbells. The colors on canvas need not be somber as you would associate with an austere subject like life and death. Then, why not bring in bright colors?
image courtesy of the artist
A visionary attempts to see beyond what is obvious. One is also aware that the bodily limitations of a human may thwart that attempt. Woo is a visionary in both senses. Passionately, he tries to illuminate what it is like to exist as something he cannot see, touch, or feel. He imagines himself, you, me, and everything intermingling. This may be an unattainable yearning. And this is what makes Woo’s beyond-human works human—so ardently human that they burn.
Where will Woo’s works go from here? However banal it may sound, anywhere and everywhere. His recent works move with striking ease among different subjects and color palettes, both of which have been expanding.
Woo has found an odd bliss in the boundless possibilities lying in the dimension of matter. If your and other bodies can comingle, if the animate and inanimate worlds are one, we are never alone.
Life and what lies beyond it, then, are companionships.
Isn’t that blissful?