Art Sonje Center presents Jeongsu Woo: Three Devils by the Bedside at The Ground from May 24 to June 30, 2024. This solo exhibition spotlights the work of an artist who has shared new possibilities in allegorical painting.

Woo references visual images and narratives from different eras, including illustrations from medieval publications, major works in art history, and characters from fiction and comics. Deconstructing and reconfiguring their contexts and narratives, his artwork creates new stories. He works in realms of stories and images that range from medieval European literature and art to the contemporary subculture, presenting allegorical reconstructions of the experiences of people today: anxiety and melancholy, desire and ambition, fear and frustration, failure, and victory. In the process, he has explored new possibilities in image narrative. This exhibition is a valuable opportunity to catch a glimpse of the artist’s new attempts.

Jeongsu Woo: Three Devils by the Bedside started out of the artist’s own experience wrestling with insomnia. The Koreans of today are having difficulty sleeping, as shown by recent media reports estimating 700,000 insomnia sufferers nationwide. The anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma that people face in the contemporary era are leading to sleepless nights, leaving society poised on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Rather than simply suffering from insomnia and depression, Woo decided to research them, a process that he began by seeking out various literature and visual materials. He conceived the current project after discovering the story of a knight in medieval Europe who was plagued by insomnia due to “three devils by his bedside”; after meeting a monk at Canterbury Cathedral, his insomnia was miraculously cured. Woo’s exhibition, which is the result of his allegorical interpretation of contemporary symptoms of depression and insomnia, includes work from his new series, Three Devils by the Bedside as well as Mr. Painter #1 (2024).

A massive work consisting of ten linked canvases, Three Devils by the Bedside (2023–2024) presents the experience of being kept awake by insomnia through a sequence of fragmented, dreamlike images. While the ten canvases are arranged in two rows to form one large image, it is an image where the composition defined by the frames of the individual canvas frames overlaps with a different system of division assigned by the artist. Within this overlapping framework, Woo repeatedly shows the figure of “Mr. Painter,” who may be seen as his own persona.

Mr. Painter appears first in the exhibition through his work, his life story presented on the canvas in a fragmented fashion. He works busily before his easel, he meets with people for the sake of his artistic success, and he seems on the verge of reaching his destination before failing. Mr. Painter shown here is similar in many ways not only to artists but to all of us living in contemporary times. The episodes relating to him are shown on the canvas in fragmentary form. Meanwhile, devils appear in the different images, observing each scene as well as the viewer. Also shown in fragmented form on the enormous canvas are illustrations adapted from Goethe’s Faust and scenes from Goya’s paintings, which appear as a kind of backdrop. These excerpts from historic images, exaggerated and caricatured, lend support to Mr. Painter’s life story, but they also configure that story in new ways, creating an effect where narratives seem to arise endlessly within the painting. In this way, the diabolical cycle of life—an infinite repetition of desires and failures, frustrations and victories—is set in motion on the canvas.

One fascinating presence is the character holding a glass of beer. While the other figures—Mr. Painter, the devils, and the different characters from the historical paintings that Woo calls upon—represent events from his own experience in chaotic yet comic ways, this character holds up its foamy beer glass like a sort of MacGuffin as it appears through the images, staring forward nonchalantly. Discovering both this character and what it signifies is another pleasure that the exhibition offers.

Art Sonje Center invites Jeongsu Woo, a young artist who is critically exploring new possibilities for allegorical painting amid a boom for the medium as the art market continues to grow. Explaining that he finds it “interesting how connected lines can become images and stories,” Woo describes his work as “paintings that originate in lines.” Lines form surfaces, which create new spaces in turn, and as color is added, these become paintings where new stories unfold. With his ongoing explorations of drawing and visual culture, Jeongsu Woo uses this exhibition to show allegories for the state of insomnia, which is a growing pathology in contemporary society. His experiments are noteworthy for the way he creates a form of cynical parody of contemporary society while staying true to the allegorical function of painting.

About the Artist
Jeongsu Woo (b. 1986)
Jeongsu Woo draws upon narratives and imagery from illustrations, mythologies, and episodes of epic theater across different time periods, reimagining and rearranging them on canvas. Using bold, free brush strokes, the artist employs printmaking and drawing techniques to playfully and satirically depict the contemporary world. He skillfully presents alternative perspectives of images, diverging from their historical contexts. Woo’s significant solo exhibitions include Palindrome (BB&M, 2022), Where Is My Voice (DOOSAN Gallery Seoul, 2020), Tit for Tat (DOOSAN Gallery New York, 2020), and Calm the Storm (Kumho Museum of Art, 2018). He has also been featured in numerous local and international group exhibitions, such as Flowing Moon, Embracing Land (Jeju Biennale, 2022), Young Korean Artists 2021 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Gwacheon, 2021), Fortune Telling (Ilmin Museum of Art, 2021), Compulsion to Repeat (Seoul Museum of Art, 2019), and Imagined Borders (Gwangju Biennale, 2018).