Fabric is good for expressing weird but beautiful things

A number of Korea’s most enjoyable up to date artists have been chosen for this 12 months’s Korean Artists At this time, a long-term challenge which can 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 respect the passage of time and to have fun 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everybody celebrates one another’s youth and their oldness, I don’t need to make any hierarchies between youth and outdated age,” she says, including that, “I needed to create a brand new creature with girls’s breasts that had been additionally within the form of a wing of a bat—as a result of I really 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 means of Woo’s work. She says that “considered one of my essential goals and concepts is to reject binary divisions and to determine a horizontal relationship with us and all beings; nature shouldn’t be within the background.” The selection of cloth as her main medium is one other manner by which Woo may be versatile, fluid and problem creative conventions: “Utilizing cloth you’ll be able to combine various kinds of texture—it’s an excellent materials to specific bizarre however stunning issues.”

One other of Woo’s preoccupation is our bodies, particularly these of girls. In 2019 Woo found that considered one of her kidneys had mysteriously shrunk to grow to be considerably smaller than the opposite. “I don’t understand how or when it occurred, possibly once I was younger, however now I’m actually interested in taking a look at 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 collection of cloth baggage 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 of macabre or monstrous.

Not too long ago Woo has been letting her darkish humour run riot by creating new fantastical organs and physique elements. A collection of flower-like cloth sculptures referred to as Bleeding have fun the month-to-month feminine menstrual cycle; and he or she is at present inventing new organs to reinforce 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 satisfy and converse with fish.”

• Woo Hannah gained the Frieze Artist Award at Frieze Seoul 2023; latest solo exhibitions embody at G Gallery, Seoul, and No.9 Cork Road, London