Betty Woodman and works inspired by Korean folk painting
On a trip to South Korea in 2001, Betty Woodman was introduced to the Joseon Dynasty folk art (minhwa)—with motifs like vibrant scenes of peonies and lotuses. With these paintings in mind, she started a new series of wall-based works titled Ceramic Pictures of Korean Paintings, which she first showed at the Daum Museum in 2002 as a five-panel mural. Woodman’s sculptural application of thin layers of terra sigillata, applied directly to the wall, mirrors layering and accumulating mineral pigment on hanji, Korean paper. Exaggerated vines, stems, and flowers—flat ceramic fragments attached to the painted wall—appear to sprout from ceramic vases. Across the mural, pairs of vases are painted to appear as single vases divided on black lacquered vase stands—motifs that she frequently referenced and transformed from minhwa. On the trip that inspired this work, Woodman bought four volumes on Korean art—reference books on bronze, celadon, and minhwa—extensively annotating them and picking up on the humorously melodramatic depictions of still-life, even if she did not understand the language.
After the exhibition at the Daum closed, Woodman recreated the painted walls on a series of five canvases, which then became the ground for her ceramic fragments and vessels, completing the work. In the painted canvas & ceramic pieces and drawings that followed, such as Santa Brigida, she not only makes references to decorative elements in Italian Baroque churches but also evokes the compositions and hues of chaekgeori paintings, a genre of still-life that flattens the pictorial surface, playing with spatial illusion and another proof of the “extraordinary ease with which Woodman moves between two and three dimensions.”
Ceramic Pictures of Korean Paintings was the beginning of a particular way of working and led to radical breakthroughs in her practice as a painter that she continued for nearly two decades. “[P]hysically distinct objects in the composition optically fuse to create the illusion of two-dimensional painting, further highlighting the interface between ceramics, sculpture, and painting. Thus Woodman's mind-boggling manipulation of dimensions arrives at its climax.”