Fabric is good for expressing weird but beautiful things

A choice of Korea’s most fun modern artists have been chosen for this 12 months’s Korean Artists Right now, a long-term mission which can see a cohort of artists chosen annually for his or her potential to make it on the worldwide stage. See the total listing right here.

Woo Hannah first attracted widespread worldwide consideration because the recipient of the inaugural Artist Award at Frieze Seoul in September 2023. Her successful fee, The Nice Ballroom, took the type of a large-scale set up that includes gigantic, vivid material 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everybody celebrates one another’s youth and their oldness, I don’t wish to make any hierarchies between youth and outdated age,” she says, including that, “I needed to create a brand new creature with ladies’s breasts that had been additionally within the form of a wing of a bat—as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 way of Woo’s work. She says that “certainly one of my principal 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 material as her major medium is one other manner during which Woo may be versatile, fluid and problem creative conventions: “Utilizing material you may combine several types of texture—it’s an excellent materials to precise bizarre however lovely issues.”

One other of Woo’s preoccupation is our bodies, particularly these of girls. In 2019 Woo found that certainly 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 by what is taken into account regular or irregular, and inspecting 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 material luggage that mimic the form of varied organs, starting from the uterus to the hippocampus and blood vessels. Different material 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.

Lately Woo has been letting her darkish humour run riot by creating new fantastical organs and physique components. A collection of flower-like material sculptures referred to as Bleeding have fun the month-to-month feminine menstrual cycle; and he or she is at the moment inventing new organs to enhance people 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 neglect issues”; and units of material 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 Avenue, London