Hannah Woo (b.1988) presents works that transcend genre boundaries—from two-dimensional pieces to sculptures and installations—using fabric as her primary medium to explore situations where opposing forces and entities such as the living and the inanimate, the protector and the protected, aging and youth, pain and ecstasy, merge and complement one another.

Her labor-intensive, handcrafted fabric sculptures propose a state that transcends fixed notions of the body, departing from binary distinctions between the human and non-human to envision a world where all beings exist in horizontal, egalitarian relationships.

In the early stages of her practice, Hannah Woo sought to summon absent or invisible beings into the exhibition space through her fabric sculptures. In her first solo exhibition, 《City Units》 (2016), she utilized materials such as fabric, styrofoam, sponge, discarded clothing, and found rabbit fur to visualize ghost-like gazes drifting through the city.

Her fabric sculptures, installed not only inside the gallery but also on the rooftop and around neighboring buildings, all appeared to stare outward with open eyes.

Art critic Yeon Sook Lee (Rita) described these anthropomorphized object-sculptures as “representing the shabby and abject emotions cast off from the consumer lifestyle of the city, as if protesting while gazing out from beyond the gallery, into the city at large.”

Through Woo’s object-sculptures, ghostly presences hidden throughout urban spaces begin to appear both within and outside the exhibition, and their gathered gazes generate unseen relational networks and latent connections.

In this way, Hannah Woo’s early works reflect her attentive gaze toward everyday, unremarkable objects found throughout the city. Her second solo exhibition, 《Swinging》 (2018), similarly took as its starting point objects with stick-like forms—such as mops and brooms—that she frequently encountered and observed closely in urban alleyways.
 
Woo focused on the inherent motion within these stick-shaped objects. By associating each item with actions and meanings derived from their everyday functions, she transformed them into distinct character-like sculptures, attaching materials such as fabric and clay to create animated, anthropomorphic forms.

As stated in the artist’s note—“Motion becomes the minimum starting point for initiating change. Though all are transformed and distorted, they move diligently, each heading in their own direction, repeating their journey”—the individual sculptures gathered together to occupy the exhibition space like a parade of protagonists marching in protest, each yearning for change.

These stick-like sculptures were also adorned with objects like flowers and ribbons, incorporating handcraft techniques such as sewing and braiding through the artist’s repetitive gestures. However, the free-spirited combinations of color and form serve to subvert conventional codes of femininity typically associated with the materials and artisanal processes used.

Everyday objects, thus transformed by the artist’s hand, have been woven into a variety of distinct personas and exhibited as protagonists in narratives that reflect her perspective on reality. However, in her 2019 solo exhibition 《Moulage Mélancolique》 at Project Space Sarubia, these objects no longer served as personified figures, but rather as background props.

In this show, Hannah Woo used her crafted objects to construct a theatrical stage and divide the space, presenting a scene in which two aspects of her inner self—each driven by conflicting desires—confronted or connected with one another.

The artist installed a partition wall to divide the space into two distinct zones, placing duplex—a piece that reflects the space she used to play in as a child—at the center. This central zone was positioned as a metaphor for her personal desire and an essential, inner space. From this vantage point, the distant view and the surrounding objects and paintings symbolized an "ideal world" the artist aspires to in reality, thereby revealing the dissonance between hope and actuality.

In the same year, at her solo exhibition 《Ma Moitié》 held at SongEun ArtCube, the artist began presenting wearable objects—fabric pieces made by sewing together discarded textiles. These wearable sculptures took the form of bodily organs such as the heart, large intestine, and kidneys.

The ‘Organ’ series began after the artist received a health check-up in 2019 and discovered that one of her kidneys had lost its function and shrunk, while the other had become enlarged to compensate for the loss.

The artist used flexible fabric to capture the mass and folds of internal organs, sometimes intentionally creating pairs by making an extra piece of one side. By rendering these pseudo-organs in bright colors, Hannah Woo expressed a sense of loss about a part of herself in a playful and cheerful manner.

The act of handcrafting organs—parts of herself that she cannot see or touch—may have been, in some way, a means for the artist to comfort herself.

This series of wearable fabric sculptures, modeled after internal organs, became more fully realized in Hannah Woo’s ‘Bag with you’ series, presented in the 2022 exhibition 《Sculptural Impulse》 at the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art. Referencing open surgery procedures, some parts of the works were created through the artist’s spontaneous, intuitive stitching.

Woo photographed models wearing the sculptures, transforming them into stylized images and distributing them as if they were fashion editorials. In ‘Bag with you’, not only human organs but also internal organs of non-human animals were rendered wearable, distorting the notion of a “normal” body and inviting the wearer to physically sense organs they would not typically be aware of.

By wearing these sculptural pieces, viewers momentarily become hybrid, anomalous beings—moving, living objects that embody bodily otherness.

Although these works originated from real internal organs, Hannah Woo eventually began crafting speculative organs that embodied her personal hopes and desires—organs with imagined, unknown functions. Sculptures like Cancer Sucker, Nightmare Sucker, and Memory Pouch were created by envisioning bodily capacities beyond those of the actual human body, expanding her practice into a realm of fiction and possibility.

Hannah Woo's body-sculptures have evolved, bridging the relationships between humans, non-humans, and objects, growing and transforming into soft yet grotesque and flamboyant hybrids.

The ‘Milk and Honey’ series, presented in 2023, utilizes the malleability of soft, flexible fabric to depict breasts gradually sagging with age. Furthermore, The Great Ballroom (2023), an extension of this series, presents various forms of breasts corresponding to the stages of a woman’s life cycle, unfurled like lavish curtains.

The heavy fabric, pulled down by gravity into a U-shape, evokes not only the image of a woman's chest but also the form of a bat with its wings spread. Hannah Woo interprets the inevitability of aging within the linear passage of time and the unyielding logic of gravity, reading it as a natural and beautiful cycle of the body, a dynamic of life. In doing so, she liberates the female body from the constraints imposed by conventional standards of beauty.

In Grand Coolly (2023), the artist brings in the unusual material of aluminum to explore the "between-worlds" that exist at the boundaries of imagination and reality, life and death, human and non-human. Inspired by the Grand Coulee in Washington, USA, a dry canyon where new life is born, this work embodies a state between life and death—something that appears lifeless but holds the potential for revival.

The aluminum sculptures forming the core of the work resemble mammalian bones, fish spines, bird wings, or tree branches, hung on the wall. Between these skeletal forms, various fabrics intertwine, and the thin, shimmering, and flexible fabric pieces weave into the stark, cold framework, hinting at the possibility of new life emerging.

Hannah Woo's fabric works, where various materials and shapes intertwine to create harmony, evoke an imagination of a world where all mutable and variable beings, which escape the dichotomous standards set by society, intertwine, coexist, and proliferate.

“Sometimes, when we see vast lakes or seas in certain areas, we always think we exchange energy with them. When we have such thoughts, I want to raise awareness of whether we can casually objectify them as a backdrop or environment without hesitation.” (Hannah Woo, in an interview for Monthly Art "ON STAGE: 9 ARTISTS")

Hannah Woo received both BFA and MFA from the Korea National University of Arts’ department of Visual Art and has held solo exhibitions at Frieze No.9 Cork Street (London, 2023), G Gallery (2023), and Song Eun Art Cube (2020).

Her recent group exhibitions include 《SeMA Omnibus: At the End of the World Split Endlessly》 (Seoul Museum of Art Seosomun Main Branch, Seoul, 2024), 《Living in Joy》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2023), 《Summer Love》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2022), 《Sculptural Impulse》 (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《2020 Next Code》 (Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, 2020), and many others, in addition to participating in the Art Plant Asia 2020 exhibition 《Hare Way Object》.

Woo received the Frieze Artist Award in 2023, and her work is in the collections of KADIST, Art Sonje Center, DOOSAN ART CENTER, and the Seoul Museum of Art. As part of the DOOSAN International Residency program, she will be attending the ISCP Residency in New York in 2025.

References

• 우한나, Hannah Woo (Artist Website) 
• 지갤러리, 우한나 (G Gallery, Hannah Woo)
• 이연숙(리타), 우한나: 세계를 소생(reanimate)시키기 
• 촉촉투명각, City Units (Choc2gak, City Units) 
• 삼육빌딩, [서문] 스윙잉 – 김해주, ‘내 멋대로 앞으로 춤’
• 프로젝트 스페이스 사루비아, Moulage Mélancolique (Project Space Sarubia, Moulage Mélancolique)
• 송은 아트큐브, [서문] Ma Moitié – 권정현 
• 북서울미술관, 조각충동 (SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Sculptural Impulse)
• 비애티튜드, 내 안의 것을 꺼낸 가방
• 월간미술, ON STAGE: 9 ARTISTS
• 프리즈, 김현진 - 여성되기-변종되기의 우한나의 사물들