Ko Woori, Uncatchable, Sentimental, Movement 02, 2022, 130.3x162.2cm, Acrylic and oil on canvas © Ko Woori

The “anxious” emotions that arise from artist Ko Woori’s human relationships serve as one alibi for reading her work. Another alibi is that her direct bodily performance is projected onto the canvas. If so, can emotion be mediated through some precise form? At the same time, can the body activate contact with the work and leave its imprint upon it, enabling tactile communication to take place between them?

First, her emotions are resolved through the work and congeal within it. In other words, if a certain emotion subsides, or is triggered, as a bodily dimension of the artist facing the work, it is distributed within another mode of the body.

The “certain” form arrived at here follows a technical mode that adjusts and controls the modality of her emotions. Rather than mediating her emotions as they are, it mediates between the artist and the work, differentiating not into a modality of such emotions but into a description of them.

Ko Woori constructs not a representation of an object, but a process of perceiving and describing an object through the contact between the body and the support. For her, the idea of drawing something contains the distinct idea of touching something. The support is replaced by an object, and the body grants it the process of performance.

As a result, the cognitive object called the artwork appears close to a single mass or a single elevation. This can be discussed on the premise that her performance is not entirely arbitrary or based on chance, regardless of whether one can conclude that the hand creates more unpredictable forms than the brush or that it is difficult for the hand to carry out delicate operations.

A certain roughness enters into relation with a certain precision. Or a certain chance enters into relation with a certain totality. In Ko Woori’s work, totality and precision are correlated, as are chance and roughness.

It seems to move toward a single form, but in fact it shapes a single surface(totality). A certain form is reflected there. Numerous chances press in upon it, and the form of the body, that is, the mark or stain of the hand, takes its place.

It constitutes a rough contact surface, yet beneath a single total surface it forms precision through differences in thickness and depth. This precision is different from dealing with the question of whether the direct bodily mediation of the hand can be assumed to enable a greater degree of manipulation and control than the brush.

The hand is both a capture from the body and a capture of the body, but this appears only after technical training that turns the body into another brush. In other words, the hand does not fantastically replace the brush; rather, the performance of making a brush with the hand follows the “previous” hand.

Here, the hand is not so much direct as it is demanding, not transparent but another reality. This is because it still functions as both a medium and a material. The hand is rough, but it is a reality that handles roughness, and it is precisely at that point that it is precise.

In the case of the ‘Uncatchable, Sentimental’(2022) series, the literary allegory in the title of the inability to capture emotion in fact directly indicates the medium-specific performative method from which the movement of the picture plane itself arises—one that is not oriented, saturated, or stabilized.

The development in which the rough hand and the surface do not “congeal” but move forward connects its precision not to itself, but to the direct or compositional interlocking of strokes(“through the overlapping of the act of using the hand, forms are disrupted so that one can focus on melody and wave”) or to the act of erasing them.

Here, drawing and erasing the work does not become a way of subtracting from the work, but a way of adding to it. This is because it does not completely eliminate what came before, but re-segments it. A rough surface that postpones decision is intentionally given, and what remains after it is erased is not what has not been erased, but a mixture of that and the “marks” of erasure.

These marks can be seen as the gesso falling away and returning to the original fabric, thereby displaying the index of the material itself, but it would be more accurate to say that such texture finally gains meaning.

Ko Woori’s work is situated as a form in the sense of a certain whole. This means that the referent does not constitute a clear segmentation. It emerges not as a visual sign, but through the process of taking the canvas and the materials themselves as a single mass and recomposing them by hand.

There is, within this, the synthesis of the artist herself. Could this not be read again as the artist’s “anxious emotions within relationships”? It is never stable, and another relationship unfolds within it.

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