In 2025, Woo Kukwon unveils 《Universe’s universe》, a painterly stage where one world is overlaid with many others. The title ‘Universe’s universe’ carries a dual meaning: one refers to an intimate, sensory world inspired by the artist’s daughter, ‘Wooju’; the other to the endless multiverse of imagination and emotion evoked by her name.
 

One day, the artist’s daughter, captivated by the idea of a unicorn, cast a gaze that posed new questions for the artist. This gaze revealed a world of emotions not yet fully articulated in language, and sensations not yet shaped by concept. That pure yearning led him to re-examine essential values that are often overlooked by mature perception. Through this gaze, the artist began to reconstruct a painterly inquiry into how we feel and experience the world.
 

In this way, 《Universe’s universe》 becomes a metaphor for a multilayered and emotional cosmos—one in which the ways we sense, imagine, and remember intersect and resonate. The exhibition expands into a painterly universe composed of fragments of sensation and layers of emotion, which reflect, collide with, and generate one another—never converging into a single narrative.
 

The exhibition is structured around three central axes. The first centres on a series of six paintings—a contemporary reinterpretation of the late 15th-century French tapestry 《The Lady and the Unicorn》. This body of work delicately explores the symbolism of the senses and the emotional resonance of the inner self.
 

The second features a collection of unicorn paintings that borrow motifs from 《The Hunt of the Unicorn》 series, produced during the same period. Drawing particular inspirations from six tapestries, including ‘The Unicorn Rests in a Garden’, these works explore the boundary between fantasy and reality.
 

The third axis comprises four paintings that continue Woo’s ongoing ‘Rye Field’ series. Each piece reimagines a literary classic through a distinct painterly language: Hemingway’s 《The Old Man and the Sea》, Cervantes’ 《Don Quixote》, Salinger’s 《The Catcher in the Rye》, and Collodi’s 《Pinocchio》. The characters from these literary works float between the realms of emotion and sensation, negotiating the order of reality while constructing their own unique worlds.
 

These three strands—encompassing classical literature, mythic symbolism, and the sensory perspective of childhood—span different eras, genres, symbols, and narratives. Yet, they intersect profoundly around shared inquiries into the nature of sensation, existence, and storytelling, converging into a singular, organic universe titled 《Universe’s universe》.
 

《The Lady and the Unicorn》, series evokes the six tapestries, masterpieces of medieval European art, with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. The original tapestries symbolise Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, Touch, and Will or Self (My Sole Desire). In this series, Woo Kukwon also juxtaposes another unicorn series, 《The Hunt of the Unicorn》, which includes ‘The Unicorn Rests in a Garden’ thereby creating a layered symbolism and a fluid transition of the senses.
 

In these series, the unicorn is no longer an absolute being of myth. It is a creature pursued, yet at the same time longed for as a symbol of purity. In the medieval imagination, the unicorn embodied resurrection and chastity; in modern literature, it evolved into a metaphor for the human yearning for lost ideals and ultimate truths. Woo Kukwon, however, peels away these layers of absoluteness and reverence. In the artist’s work, the unicorn often appears hesitant, slightly awkward, even approachable. Rather than a symbol of transcendent mystery, it is rendered with emotional proximity and a warm, subtle humour. This is not merely a dismantling of symbolism—it is something more.
 

This transformation is shaped by the gaze of the artist’s daughter, ‘Woojoo’. When the child became captivated by unicorns, the artist did not dismiss it as a a mere preference or trend. Rather, he recognised in it a pure longing—an unfiltered desire inaccessible to the adult eye, and a point of entry into forgotten senses and values. Through her gaze, the artist began to see the world anew. The unicorn, once a distant symbol, is summoned again through a child’s curiosity—as a conduit to sincerity and the essence of feeling. In 《Touch》, a blonde girl reaches gently towards the unicorn’s face; in 《Smell》 a dog and a girl quietly coexist, inhaling the scent of wildflowers. Within these paintings, sensation becomes more than perception or stimulus—it becomes a mode of connection, a language of emotion. Here, the senses transform into love, into questions, and at times, into a path toward truth revealed through failure.
 

Another axis of the exhibition is rooted in literary imagination. The artist translates figures and narrative structures from classic works of literature into the language of painting, evoking emotional depth not through the act of reading but through visual sensation. These works offer a renewed density of feeling, experienced through the eye rather than the page. 《The Catcher in the Rye》 series draws upon sources including Hemingway’s 《The Old Man and the Sea》, Collodi’s 《Pinocchio》, Cervantes’ 《Don Quixote》, and Salinger’s 《The Catcher in the Rye》. Across these paintings, each protagonist appears at odds with reality—lost or drifting in the gap between the ideal and the real.
 

Across these four literary sources, the artist identifies recurring themes: a lack of self-awareness, a blind pursuit of truth, and an anxious sense of identity estranged from the world. Woo Kukwon translates these concerns into a visual language, steering away from straightforward illustration. Rather than merely depicting scenes, he constructs painterly structures around the psychological unravelling—or emotional reassembly—of the characters. His paintings do not seek to mirror the literary worlds they reference; instead, they extract and reconstruct the emotional frameworks embedded within them.
 

The recurring presence of the blonde girl and the schnauzer functions as a distinct symbolic device within Woo Kukwon’s visual language. These figures draw the viewer’s gaze beyond the boundaries of narrative, remaining in dialogue with the literary source material while never being confined by it. As ‘sensory narrators’, the girl and the dog traverse the before and after of narrative structure. They shape the atmosphere and emotional tone of each work, guiding the viewer through shifting registers of feeling and perception.

 

Among the new works unveiled in this exhibition, the large-scale painting 《Wuthering Heights》 commands particular attention as an emotional climax. Spanning 3 metres in width and 168 centimetres in height, the composition intertwines the turbulent forces of nature with the inner turmoil of its figures, creating a charged and dynamic tension. Far beyond a mere landscape, the piece becomes a landscape of emotion itself, revealing a painterly density that intricately weaves sensation, narative, and feeling into a multidimensional whole.
 

《Wuthering Heights》 does not directly depict Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name, but instead translates its prevailing emotions of love, pain, madness, and obsession into painterly form. Figures are either absent or only faintly suggested; yet the emotional currents that flow across the canvas materialise the complexity and depths of human existence, clearly articulating the essence of Woo Kukwon’s approach to emotional painting.
 

Literary characters are understood not as singular archetypes, but as aggregates of emotional structures. Much like the figures that appear in the Unicorn series, they embody gestures in pursuit of truth amid human frailty and emotional excess. While the unicorn functions as a tool that deconstructs myth and questions the conditions of existence, the literary figures operate as agents of emotional restoration or mourners of irretrievable sensibilities. Despite belonging to distinct painterly modes, these two strands are closely interconnected through their shared inquiry into the nature of ‘living sensation’.
 

《Universe’s Universe》 defies singular interpretation or linear narrative closure. Rather, the exhibition unfolds as a cosmic parallel structure—layered with overlapping senses, multifaceted narratives, and intersecting emotions. It contains neither the orderly logic of a settled myth nor the finality of an absolute story. Instead, the artist discovers new painterly possibilities within these gaps and fractures, weaving together multidimensional universes through the gaze of the cosmos—an imaginative threshold opened by pure sensation.
 

This painterly inquiry, which begins with the artist’s daughter ‘Woojoo’, does not remain within the bounds of personal intuition. Instead, it expands into a universal exploration of sensation and the conditions of existence. The artist deliberately sidesteps the connotations of order and closure embedded in the word ‘Universe’, choosing instead to render it in lowercase—‘universe’—to draw attention not to grand truths, but to subtle emotional fissures and the illogical yet sincere currents of feeling.
 

《Universe’s Universe》 is, in this sense, an exhibition about the small universes we each inhabit and live through in our own way. It resists resolution into a single answer, instead unfolding into a structure of branching, unresolved questions
 

And now—what face does the unicorn wear, as it stands before you?
And what shape does your universe take, as you face the unicorn?