A choice of Korea’s most fun modern artists have been chosen for this 12 months’s Korean Artists Right this moment, a long-term challenge which is able to see a cohort of artists chosen every year for his or her potential to make it on the worldwide stage. See the complete checklist right here.
Woo Hannah first attracted widespread worldwide consideration because the recipient of the inaugural Artist Award at Frieze Seoul in September 2023. Her profitable fee, The Nice Ballroom, took the type of a large-scale set up that includes gigantic, vivid cloth draperies hanging from the eight-metre-high ceiling of the exhibition corridor.
The enveloping work invited guests to expertise and admire the passage of time and to have a good time the ageing feminine physique, with pendulous breast-like loops of textile and elaborate, decorative foldings, creasings and crumplings seen by Woo as analogous to the wrinkling and sagging of human pores and skin. “In my rococo-style ballroom everybody celebrates one another’s youth and their oldness, I don’t wish to make any hierarchies between youth and previous age,” she says, including that, “I needed to create a brand new creature with ladies’s breasts that have been additionally within the form of a wing of a bat—as a result of I like bats, they’re so cute, and they’re so stigmatised, particularly since coronavirus.”
A playfully subversive need to dissolve inflexible distinctions and to combine up established categorisations—whether or not in artwork, biology or society—runs by way of Woo’s work. She says that “one among my most important goals and concepts is to reject binary divisions and to ascertain a horizontal relationship with us and all beings; nature shouldn’t be within the background.” The selection of cloth as her major medium is one other approach through which Woo might be versatile, fluid and problem creative conventions: “Utilizing cloth you possibly can combine several types of texture—it’s an excellent materials to specific bizarre however lovely issues.”
One other of Woo’s preoccupation is our bodies, particularly these of ladies. In 2019 Woo found that one among her kidneys had mysteriously shrunk to grow to be considerably smaller than the opposite. “I don’t understand how or when it occurred, perhaps after I was younger, however now I’m actually inquisitive about what is taken into account regular or irregular, and analyzing relationships and pairings of organs.” Impressed by her private scenario and “emotions of loss and possessiveness”, Woo has created many works that play with and off bodily types. These embody a sequence of cloth luggage that mimic the form of assorted organs, starting from the uterus to the hippocampus and blood vessels. Different cloth sculptures mix representations of female and male anatomy to problem what we select to disclose or conceal and what’s thought-about macabre or monstrous.
Lately Woo has been letting her darkish humour run riot by creating new fantastical organs and physique components. A sequence of flower-like cloth sculptures referred to as Bleeding have a good time the month-to-month feminine menstrual cycle; and she or he is at present inventing new organs to enhance those who we already possess, and to fulfil a few of her interspecies ambitions. These embody a “reminiscence pouch”, “as a result of I very simply overlook issues”; and units of cloth gills, “as a result of I’ve a need to breathe in water and to fulfill and converse with fish.”
• Woo Hannah received the Frieze Artist Award at Frieze Seoul 2023; latest solo exhibitions embody at G Gallery, Seoul, and No.9 Cork Road, London