Four years ago, doctors gave Hannah Woo alarming news. One of her kidneys had shrunk, becoming significantly smaller than the other. As a result, “I found myself focusing on feelings of loss and possessiveness,” Woo tells me. “This led to the creation of a series of fabric bags that mimicked the shapes of various organs.”
Woo is now 35 years old, and her fabric sculptures of kidneys, uteri, hippocampi, and blood vessels have propelled her to stardom. In September, at Frieze Seoul, she presented “The Great Ballroom,” a large-scale installation that featured a collection of draped fabrics hung from the ceiling in the shape of a woman’s sagging breasts. The piece won her the art fair’s inaugural Artist Award. This month, Woo is exhibiting new works at the West Bund Art & Design Fair, in Shanghai, alongside emerging artists such as Yoonhee Choi and Sueyon Hwang. “While my sculptures usually represent protagonists … these works portray the world in which they reside.”
As a child in Daejeon, a small city two hours south of Seoul by train, Woo dreamed of being an animator and a fashion designer. “I loved drawing and creating things as a child.” Unlike many of her friends’ parents, Woo’s parents weren’t intent on their child’s becoming an academic. “They believed in experiences,” she says. Her mother was a successful interior designer and, later, a painter. “Her studio was a room in our house, and I used to sneak in to smell and squeeze the tubes of paint and read the labels.”
“I found myself focusing on feelings of loss and possessiveness.”
Woo’s mother encouraged her to attend a fine-arts high school, where she took art lessons for 20 hours a week. By 2008, when she moved to Seoul to study at the Korea National University of Arts, she felt burned out from her rigorous high-school program. She avoided painting and sculpture classes, instead taking theater and writing courses.
During Woo’s third year, she took a scenario-writing class in which students wrote screenplays based on Greek tragedies; it was taught by the film director Lee Chang-dong. “I’m a sensitive person,” says Woo. “Through the class, I learned to think of myself as a protagonist in a story, which let me view my experiences from a more objective perspective.”
Around this time, she also started using fabric to make art. “It was the most economical and attractive material for me,” says Woo. “I was also influenced by the stuffed animals and blankets that were always in my room as a child.”
In 2014, Woo participated in an exchange program in Switzerland, then traveled around Brazil because “I love bossa nova,” she says. “I wanted to see everything for myself.”
But when she returned to Korea around 2016, Woo found herself in a creative lull. Her art wasn’t winning competitions, and she wasn’t receiving any grants. Desperate, she hosted her own solo show at her studio in Euljiro, an up-and-coming area in Seoul. Instead of inviting people inside the space, she hung her fabric works on the exterior of the building and told attendees to shine lights on the building’s façade.
“I thought it could very well be my last exhibition ever, which led me to make the decision to try out everything I ever wanted,” she explains. “It resulted in a very ‘me’ show.” It was a hit and garnered her attention and exhibition offers.
But the show also led to doubts. “After realizing how easy it was to put a certain frame around the idea of a woman working with fabric, I was slightly horrified and tried to move on to different materials for a while,” Woo says. In the end, “I couldn’t help but come back to fabric.… I finally was able to fully understand that fabric was my material.”
The West Bund Art & Design Fair will be on in Shanghai beginning November 9
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Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
