Sun Woo (b. 1994) creates works by combining digital tools with traditional painting techniques. She collects countless images floating in the digital world, transforms them in her own unique way, and translates them into paintings. Her works, which simultaneously reveal digital sensibilities and painterly materiality, demonstrate new possibilities for painting in the digital age.

Sun Woo's early works focus on how women's bodies are consumed and represented in contemporary media. In particular, she examines how the images of young women are circulated and consumed in K-pop and Japanese animation. 
 
To explore this, Sun Woo extracts images from girl group music videos, stage performances, and animations featuring young girls, then reconstructs them using bold, provocative colors and cartoon-like elements. In her process, she prints parts of digitally sketched images onto canvas and completes the remaining sections with paint, creating a unique interplay between digital and traditional media.

Sun Woo's early works, which blend digital printing and painting, blur the boundaries between the two mediums, creating a sense of confusion in the viewer's perception. When viewed through photographs, her works may appear as digital drawings, while from a distance, they seem entirely hand-painted. 
 
The artist sees this ambiguous boundary as an effective way to reflect how images are handled in today's media landscape. Her later works continue this approach, collecting and reconstructing widely consumed media imagery—such as newly released apps, trending memes, and idol fandom culture—through Photoshop before translating them into painting.

Sun Woo uses Photoshop to detach collected images from their original contexts, manipulating and recombining their composition, color, and angles as she sees fit. These reassembled images are then brought to life on canvas, layered like Photoshop files through a combination of airbrushing and hand-painting. 
 
The airbrushed surfaces mimic the smooth texture of a screen, while the hand-painted sections retain visible brushstrokes and paint textures, enhancing the painterly quality of the work.

The references reflected in Sun Woo's paintings often overlap past and present, as well as Korean and Western influences. She juxtaposes and weaves together images drawn from objects imbued with past societal desires—such as talismans or jangseung (Korean totem poles)—alongside childhood memorabilia and countless anonymous stories circulating in real time on social media. Through this layering, she creates moments that feel strange yet precariously balanced. 
 
The objects within her compositions serve as symbols pointing to aspects of society or as vessels carrying personal narratives. At the same time, they may exist solely to disrupt and negate any clear context. This interplay of multilayered elements results in a surreal atmosphere within her work.

Experiencing the shifts in daily life during the 2020 pandemic, Sun Woo began working on a new series. Moving away from canvas, she adopted a new approach by painting with acrylic on steel. This series explores the blurring boundaries between interior and exterior spaces as life transitioned from the offline world to the online realm.

The artist saw parallels between this shift and Miniroom, a customizable virtual space from Cyworld, a popular early 2000s Korean social media platform. Users could decorate their Minirooms however they liked, transforming them into clubs, movie theaters, or other imagined environments—essentially bringing the outside world into an interior space.
 
Building on this idea, Sun Woo used steel, a material typically found in architectural exteriors, as her canvas to depict interior scenes. These scenes were primarily composed of imagery sourced from Cyworld Minirooms and pronk still-life paintings, a genre of 17th-century Dutch art.

Unveiled in 2023, Long Shower focuses on the sensory experiences of the body in relation to indoor spaces. Centered around the artist’s own room, the work entangles interior spaces with external elements like heavy rain, creating an uncanny sensory friction. Elements such as damp carpets and waterlogged surfaces evoke a heightened sense of touch. 
 
Having long contemplated how her paintings are consumed as images in virtual spaces, Sun Woo designed her work to allow viewers to focus on sensation itself through these elements. In today’s screen-mediated world, images lose their tactile qualities, appearing flat and polished. However, by detaching her imagery from the screen, Sun Woo reintroduces texture and physicality, restoring a new sense of embodied experience.

Sun Woo also explores the contemporary redefinition of physical existence through technology by merging mechanical and organic elements, presenting mutable bodies that challenge the limits of the human form. 
 
Accordingly, the bodies depicted in her paintings do not appear intact or static; instead, they are fragmented and continuously transforming. This reflects the way images in the digital world are rapidly generated, edited, and consumed.

The grotesque figures and distorted bodies in Sun Woo’s works stem from her dystopian imagination. For instance, Land of Hollow (2022) depicts a desolate winter landscape strewn with crumbling, fragmented bodies. 
 
Scattered across the icy wasteland, denture-like teeth and severed strands of hair are juxtaposed with remnants of classical architecture, evoking the ruins of a fallen ancient civilization.

Meanwhile, Sun Woo’s recent work, Weavers' Room (2024), centers around the labor of women in weaving and sewing, roles traditionally tied to women throughout history. In the serene space of the painting, the female body is represented as a natural architectural form, resembling an ant’s nest made from earth, saliva, and excrement. Upon closer examination of these somewhat grotesque shapes, overlapping images of human pores, bruised skin, and women's breasts emerge.

Surrounding these rough, wrinkled bodily masses are cobwebs and hair tangled in old spinning wheels and sewing machines. These scenes prompt reflection on the long history of women’s labor, often carried out in silence. Furthermore, the Western architectural style and antique objects that form this room act as ambivalent devices, evoking both nostalgia for the past and the repressed hierarchies of that time.

Sun Woo’s works often depict dystopian scenes, but they also convey the possibility of recovery. For example, The Fifer (2024) portrays an aged bone fife standing in a desolate cave, leaking an unknown liquid.
 
The image of the fife, surrounded by tangled strands of hair and gazing at the puddle it has created, evokes thoughts of the vulnerability, alienation, and mortality of the body. While the body metaphorically represented by the fife appears fragile, its nature as a musical instrument suggests a lingering potential for the retrieval of voice and vitality.

In this way, Sun Woo’s works, which combine digital imagery with painting elements, provide the viewer with an intense visual experience that prompts deep reflection on the relationship between technology and humanity. She critically examines contemporary consumer culture and its underlying structures through the use of popular cultural symbols and icons, while also offering a new perspective on the body in the digital age.

”I imagine digital images as discorporate 'bodies' inhabiting the virtual environment, bringing them out of the screen and adding weight to them through physical labor. This is my way of thinking about our own bodies in today's society, which is an important concept in my practice.” (Sun Woo, Artist’s Note)

Born in Seoul and raised in Canada, Sun Woo studied fine art at Columbia University in New York and graduated in 2017. After returning to Seoul, she continued her artistic practice. She held her first solo exhibition at Foundwill Arts Society in Seoul in 2020 and has since held numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as Cylinder (Seoul, 2021), Woaw Gallery (Hong Kong, 2021), Carl Kostyál (London, 2022), Make Room (Los Angeles, 2023), and Frieze London (London, 2024).
 
Recent group exhibitions she has participated in include 《Cities in the Room》 (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2023), 《Materi-delia》 (Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2023), 《Wetting Your Whistles》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2023), and 《Myths of Our Time》 (Thaddaeus Ropac, Seoul, 2023).
 
Sun Woo’s works are in the collections of The Perimeter, London and Museu Inimá da Paula, Belo Horizonte.

References

• 타데우스 로팍, 한선우 (Thaddaeus Ropac, Sun Woo)
• 디노마드, [INTERVIEW] 디지털과 아날로그 사이에서 그리는 욕망, '한선우' 
• 서울시립미술관, 방으로 간 도시들 (Seoul Museum of Art, Cities in the Room)
• 타데우스 로팍, 지금 우리의 신화 (Thaddaeus Ropac, Myths of Our Time) 
• 권태현, 전시 “마테리델리아” 작품 설명문 (Taehyun Kwon, Exhibition “Materidelia” Artwork Description)
• Gallery Vacancy, 한선우 (Gallery Vacancy, Sun Woo)