Woo Jong Taek brings his works together under the concept of “Memory of Origin” – a remembrance of the origin. What is meant is less the memory of a specific place than of something primordial that connects human beings and nature. In his paintings, nature does not appear as an object of contemplation, but as something of which we ourselves are a part.
Through powerful, often sweeping gestures, the artist creates forms that may evoke trees, landscapes, earth, or organic growth without depicting them directly. They deliberately remain suspended between figuration and abstraction. What is visible becomes the trace of a deeper experience – a memory of the forces and structures from which life emerges.

This is where a particular tension in Woo Jong Taek’s painting lies: movement and stillness, energy and contemplation exist simultaneously. The immediate, physical movement of painting is counterbalanced by the calm of the open pictorial space. It is precisely this interplay that gives the works their characteristic East Asian spirit.
Memory of Origin can therefore also be understood as a search for a state preceding the separation of human beings and nature. For Woo, the origin of life does not appear as a single point of beginning, but as a harmonious interaction of different forces and forms of life.
The resulting images feel at once immediate and familiar, even though they resist any unambiguous figurative reading. When nature becomes art and art becomes nature again, Woo Jong Taek’s works touch upon something that can be remembered more readily than explained: the idea of a shared origin.