Woo Hannah “Fabric is good for expressing weird but beautiful things”

Meet the artist who was selected to be the upcoming Korean Artists Today

By Louisa Buck

Jun 19, 2024 09:56 AM

A selection of Korea’s most exciting contemporary artists have been selected for this year’s Korean Artists Today, a long-term project which will see a cohort of artists chosen each year for their potential to make it on the global stage. See the full list here .

Woo Hannah first gained public attention when she was named the winner of the first Artist Award at Frieze Seoul in September 2023. The winning piece, The Great Ballroom took the form of a massive installation that featured massive, vibrant fabric draperies that hung from the eight-metre high ceiling of the hall for the exhibition.

The work’s enveloping design invited guests to be able to feel and experience the passing of time as well as to celebrate the aging female body with lacy breast-like loops made of cloth as well as elaborate, intricate folds as well as crumplings and creasings, which are interpreted by Woo as akin to the wrinkles and sagging that characterize human skin. “In my rococo-style ballroom everyone celebrates each other’s youth and their oldness, I don’t want to make any hierarchies between youth and old age,” she explains and adds, “I wanted to create a new creature with women’s breasts that were also in the shape of a wing of a bat–because I love bats, they are so cute, and they are so stigmatised, especially since coronavirus.”

A playfully subversive desire to dissolve rigid distinctions and to mix up established categorisations–whether in art, biology or society–runs through Woo’s work. She states that “one of my main aims and ideas is to reject binary divisions and to establish a horizontal relationship with us and all beings; nature should not be in the background.” The selection for fabric to be her main medium of choice is a different technique by the way that Woo can be a versatile fluid and challenging traditional artistic practices: “Using fabric you can mix different types of texture–it’s a very good material to express weird but beautiful things.”

Another area of Woo’s interest is the body, particularly the female ones. In 2019, Woo realized that one kidney had shrinked to be significantly larger than another. “I don’t know how or when it happened, maybe when I was young, but now I’m really curious about looking at what is considered normal or abnormal, and examining relationships and pairings of organs.” Inspired by her personal circumstances along with “feelings of loss and possessiveness”, Woo has created several pieces that play with and off bodily shapes. This includes a set of fabric bags that imitate the form of various organs, from the uterus, to the blood vessels and hippocampus. Some fabric sculptures incorporate representations of female and male anatomy to question the choices we make about what to show or hide and what’s considered to be unnatural or bizarre.

Recently, Woo has let her dark humor riot through the creation of new, fantastical organs as well as body components. A set of flower-like sculptures made of fabric known as Bleeding are a celebration of the monthly menstrual cycle of women; and she is currently creating new organs to complement those we already have as well as to fulfill some of her interspecies goals. They include an “memory pouch”, “because I very easily forget things” and set of gills made of fabric “because I have a desire to breathe in water and to meet and speak with fish.”

* Woo Hannah was awarded the Frieze Artist Award at Frieze Seoul 2023. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at G Gallery, Seoul, and No.9 Cork Street, London