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 attracted widespread international attention as the recipient of the inaugural Artist Award at Frieze Seoul in September 2023. Her winning commission, The Great Ballroom, took the form of a large-scale installation featuring gigantic, vivid fabric draperies hanging from the eight-metre-high ceiling of the exhibition hall.
The enveloping work invited visitors to experience and appreciate the passage of time and to celebrate the ageing female body, with pendulous breast-like loops of textile and elaborate, ornamental foldings, creasings and crumplings seen by Woo as analogous to the wrinkling and sagging of 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 says, adding that, “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.”
Woo Hannah’s The Great Ballroom (2023), an installation featuring gigantic fabric draperies, for which she won the inaugural Artist Award at Frieze Seoul in 2023 Photo: © Woo Hannah, courtesy the artist
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 says 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 choice of fabric as her primary medium is another way in which Woo can be versatile, fluid and challenge artistic conventions: “Using fabric you can mix different types of texture—it’s a very good material to express weird but beautiful things.”
Another of Woo’s preoccupation is bodies, especially those of women. In 2019 Woo discovered that one of her kidneys had mysteriously shrunk to become significantly smaller than the other. “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 situation and “feelings of loss and possessiveness”, Woo has created many works that play with and off bodily forms. These include a series of fabric bags that mimic the shape of various organs, ranging from the uterus to the hippocampus and blood vessels. Other fabric sculptures combine representations of male and female anatomy to challenge what we choose to reveal or conceal and what is considered macabre or monstrous.
Recently Woo has been letting her dark humour run riot by creating new fantastical organs and body parts. A series of flower-like fabric sculptures called Bleeding celebrate the monthly female menstrual cycle; and she is currently inventing new organs to augment those that we already possess, and to fulfil some of her interspecies ambitions. These include a “memory pouch”, “because I very easily forget things”; and sets of fabric gills, “because I have a desire to breathe in water and to meet and speak with fish.”
• Woo Hannah won the Frieze Artist Award at Frieze Seoul 2023; recent solo exhibitions include at G Gallery, Seoul, and No.9 Cork Street, London
