Current Exhibition
Harmony & Disharmony
Woo Jung KOH
"Harmony&Disharmony"  Woo Jung solo exhibition  

Duration​
2024.2 .24 - 04.07

Korean artist Woo Jung was invited to participate in the 2024 International Residency Program, holding her first solo exhibition in Taiwan. Titled "Harmony & Disharmony," the exhibition showcases her works created at the Chin Chin Pottery Studio in Tainan during the residency, as a continuation of her creative journey in Taiwan. The exhibition aims to represent her current emotional state. Her works portray life experiences as collisions with harmonious elements, arising from the intersection and conflicts between personal and interpersonal psychological states.

Born in Korea, the artist's exchange experiences in Taiwan and the United States have shaped her expression of emotions through ceramics, contemplating acceptance and rejection in the process of communication with others, learning to conceal and evade. These recurring processes directly influence her duality and emotional contradictions. Initially, she expressed her emotions through her works, gradually expanding to explore emotional relationships between people. Her works are characterized by exaggerated forms and vivid colors, leaving a strong visual impression. They demonstrate collisions of various concepts, exploring the balance between life and space, and experiencing conflicts between negativity and positivity, anxiety, and stability. These experiences have taught her acceptance and survival.

Simultaneously, her firsthand experiences of cultural and national differences and attempts to find connections between them have further enriched her understanding. The forms of heads, faces, and hands in her works stem from observations of people when she first arrived in other countries. She often analyzes situations and the emotions of others through observing their expressions, body language, and even the tone of their voices. The artist is particularly interested in how people commonly use a second language to express emotions, exploring how emotions transcend the realm of language during communication, while also reflecting on her ways of expressing emotions in her Korean upbringing.

She further explores the possibility of visualizing emotions through elements such as form, color, lines, and techniques of glaze application, which express not only her own emotions but also evoke emotions in viewers. Different environments and cultural differences have influenced her artistic style; while in the past she let the works speak for themselves, with improved language skills, she can now express her feelings through words and transfer thoughts she doesn't want to verbalize, into artworks or text, presenting them on her works. The works depict the artist's inner state and rhythm of life, presenting various stages of examining, discovering, understanding, accepting, and interpreting emotions, as well as the process of seeking balance and harmony.