Sang A Han (b. 1987) begins her work from memories of everyday experiences and the emotions that arise from them. Grounded in the expressive methods of traditional East Asian painting, her practice unfolds the subtle and complex emotions and memories that cannot be reduced to a single word, articulating them through a metaphorical and symbolic visual language shaped by the many changes she experiences as an artist, a woman, and an individual.

Sang A Han’s work begins with drawing in meok (ink) on cotton fabric, weaving together fragments of emotions and imaginations that stem from autobiographical experiences. The medium and expressive methods of traditional East Asian painting, which form the foundation of her practice, possess a multilayered character that resembles the stories she seeks to convey.
 
In East Asia, meok is referred to as hyeon-saek (玄色), symbolizing the fundamental color of the universe that exists even without the light of the sun. The variations in its tones are understood to represent the countless colors that make up all things in the cosmos. Han explains that meok, which holds within it not a simple black but a broad spectrum, is a medium well-suited to embody the inner resonances of the artist.

Moreover, meok responds to water more swiftly and sensitively than any other material. Depending on the movement of the brush tip, the ink drifts across the cotton fabric—sometimes quickly, at other times slowly. It creates its own vibrations and waves through the forces of advancing and resisting, floating along with the water until it finally settles into the fabric. The cotton, though fragile against sharpness, is a tenacious material densely woven with warp and weft.
 
In this way, Sang A Han continues her practice upon the dual qualities of softness and resilience. The opaque shapes of her inner emotions spread roundly from the pointed brush, becoming images with contours. These soon turn into thin fragments layered upon other surfaces. Through the labor-intensive process of filling the spaces between black-and-white fragments with cotton and stitching them together with thread, the artist weaves a world that moves between reality and unreality.

The works thus created emerge as unfamiliar landscapes where layers of ink interweave with the artist’s narratives, emotions, and imaginations. For instance, in her first solo exhibition 《Unfamiliar Space》 (Weekend, 2018), Han expressed the complex and nuanced feelings that accompanied her pregnancy—joy intertwined with emotions that were not purely happy.
 
The emotions that arose from having someone to protect are intertwined in her work with ominous imaginings and fantasies of disasters that have not yet occurred, revealing a sense of anxiety, while scenes rendered through a romantic lens convey the artist’s intricate and delicate state of mind.

In her following solo exhibition 《Unfamiliar Wave》 (SONGEUN ARTCUBE, 2019), Han unfolded the events that had created great waves in her life as symbolic and surreal landscapes where metaphor and imagination were interwoven. For example, Unfamiliar Wave 1 (2019), which surrounded the exhibition space, reconstructed images from her earlier works and condensed the life-altering events—such as marriage, childbirth, and child-rearing—into her own symbolic signs, presented across three distinct compositions.
 
The work traced a journey from the period of calm, when she enjoyed a solitary life undisturbed by great waves, through the many changes brought by marriage and childbirth, to the formation of relationships among mother, artist, and child—rendered with the use of mythological elements.

Her works do not attempt to organize the emotions arising from the dual position of being both a mother—who gives birth and raises a child—and an individual artist into a coherent narrative. Instead, she unfolds them as they are, in their fragmented and contradictory states, through metaphor and symbolism.
 
Fragments of emotions such as loneliness, despair, anxiety, fear, and anticipation appear in her works as ambiguous, loosely defined geometric forms; as partial bodies that resist grasping as a whole; and as abstracted representations of tangible elements closely tied to reality—such as the sky and sea, the sun and moon, stars and clouds, fire and water.

Thus, the unfamiliar scenes that emerge from natural motifs evoke universal truths of life. The cycles of nature recall the order of birth and death, while geometric figures, symbolic signs, symmetrical compositions, and ascending structures trigger associations with healing, faith, conviction, and hope, grounded in the transcendent powers often found in myth and religion.
 
Yet, the artist does not speak of an object of transcendental worship through the codes of myth or religion. Instead, she places at the center a journey of finding her own position within the smallest, most secular acts and existences of daily life—treating them as something more sublime than anything else.

Surrounding these symbolic images that embody the artist’s journey was the installation Unfamiliar Wave (2019), which appeared as if fragments of a narrative had protruded into the space. The abstract, mobile-like figures drifting in the dark, ink-colored environment were inspired by the mobiles that newborns gaze upon—referencing the period when the artist’s own child was an infant.
 
The process of drawing with meok on cotton fabric, filling it with cotton, and stitching it together offered a safe and sustainable method of making—unlike paper, which is easily torn—allowing her to continue her practice while living alongside her child. As such, the mobile works reveal both her identity as an artist and as a parent.

Since then, Sang A Han has steadily developed her “hanging” works, installations suspended in the air like mobiles. The process of touching and weaving the soft texture of cotton fabric, filling it with cotton to create volume, functions as a healing element for her. In seeking visual and physical balance through this process, her practice also becomes an exploration of balance and harmony between work and daily life—as both a mother and a full-time artist.

In this way, the theme of “balance” plays a crucial role in Han’s practice. For instance, in her ‘Void Pagoda’ (2021–) series, she focused on balance in the process of stacking sculptural forms filled with cotton to create volume. Void Pagoda 1 (2021), presented at Oil Tank Culture Park, consisted of six massive stone-like forms piled atop one another, its monumental scale resembling the pagodas often found in Buddhist temples.
 
In Buddhism, the pagoda serves as an object of faith, a metaphor for the Buddha’s presence, around which devotees walk in prayer and worship. Meanwhile, visitors often pick up small stones near the temple and stack their own miniature towers, making wishes as they do so.

The artist’s pagoda was created with the heartfelt wish to protect what is precious. During the time of COVID-19, when many things became sources of fear, the situation brought an additional layer of anxiety for the artist, who lives alongside delicate beings. Against this backdrop, the artist stacked precarious pagodas, infusing them with a prayerful hope of “getting through today safely.”
 
Unlike traditional pagodas built from heavy stones, Han’s pagoda relies on fake stones filled with soft cotton, defying gravity and achieving balance through strings suspended from the ceiling.

Sculptural experiments involving hanging, stacking, and suspending objects made of meok and fabric began to emerge prominently in two solo exhibitions held around the same time in 2022. In the solo exhibition 《Pointed Mind》 at the OCI Museum of Art, Sang A Han utilized the gallery’s high ceilings and expansive walls as a stage to unfold narratives accumulated during the pandemic, both as a mother and an artist, through mobiles, scrolls, and towers.
 
The exhibition’s title, “Pointed Mind,” carries a dual meaning, metaphorically capturing the ambivalent emotions experienced in social roles. The black and pale scenes extending along the horizontal and vertical axes of the gallery conveyed the artist’s sharp yet rounded inner feelings, precariously balanced yet mysteriously harmonious throughout the space.

Meanwhile, in the same year, the solo exhibition 《Pointed Warmth》 at BYFOUNDRY explored the theme of “love” amid the complex and sometimes contradictory emotions triggered by Sang A Han’s dual identity as both mother and artist.
 
The artist captures pieces of thought and emotion created by the tension between her prayers for her family’s peace and well-being, and the necessity as an artist to be sharp and exacting toward the things she holds dear. These fragments are expressed in surrealistic scenes of outstretched or praying hands, symbols like flames and stars that suggest a mythological or religious context, and more organic shapes like meandering lines that extend or split into several strands.

Recently, Sang A Han has been exploring the philosophy of Julia Kristeva, focusing on the body, and interpreting motherhood as a “dynamic space of practice” where one both embraces otherness within one’s own boundaries and simultaneously forms new identities.
 
Han’s work, which has long addressed themes of motherhood, the body, and the maternal, has expanded to consider the body as a space that connects and communicates with the external environment. For example, in the solo exhibition 《Black Flame》 at the Galleria Fumagalli in Milan last year, the ‘Void Pagoda’ series presented maternal forms combining flowers and the human body, conveying both the warmth and tenderness of motherhood as well as the complex, ambivalent, and sometimes unsettling aspects of motherhood that Kristeva describes.

Accompanying this, the ‘Black Figurine’ series combines flowers with human legs to visually embody the experience of childbirth and the complex emotions of motherhood. Among these, Black Figurine 2 (2024) merges the image of a human figure with legs apart and a flower, metaphorically reflecting the artist’s two childbirth experiences.
 
In this way, Sang A Han recognizes motherhood and the maternal in the process of seeking identity based on life’s balance, translating these insights into her work. At the same time, she has moved beyond her previous “hanging” works, which were suspended from the ceiling, to experiment with “self-standing” pieces that can stand independently without support.

The artist’s recent works, described by her as “self-standing bodies” and “flesh,” exist as sculptural objects with solid frameworks. For example, the arched self-standing piece Threshold (玄關) 2 (2024) was inspired by the Buddhist concept of hyeongwan (玄關), meaning “a gateway that penetrates profound and subtle truths.” Han combines this image of a threshold with the female body (the womb), presenting it as a site of possibility where the maternal can transition and connect to another dimension.

Sang A Han’s work begins with deeply personal, autobiographical experiences, yet the multilayered emotions and reflections embedded within them resonate as universal feelings that humans hold toward what they cherish. In this way, the artist’s narratives establish a sense of empathy with viewers and expand into a broader, shared story.

 “The starting point of my work comes from bodily and emotional memories rooted in experience. Pregnancy, childbirth, and the transition into motherhood made me perceive my body not as a fixed place but as an open space, constantly changing and relating to the Other.
 
That period was profoundly existential for me, and thereafter my work shifted focus from the body itself to how the body functions as a boundary, as a space, and as a site that allows generation. The forms of natural objects that appear in my recent works—leaves, stems, roots, nodules, spiny creatures—are an extension of this trajectory.”   (Sang A Han, excerpted from an artist talk during the solo exhibition 《Flesh & Flash》)

Sang A Han received her BFA and MFA in Oriental Painting from Hongik University. Her solo exhibitions include 《Flesh & Flash》 (The WilloW, Seoul, 2025), 《Black Flame》 (Galleria Fumagalli, Milan, 2024), 《Pointed Warmth》 (BYFOUNDRY, Seoul, 2022), 《Pointed Mind》 (OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《Unfamiliar Wave》 (SONGEUN ARTCUBE, Seoul, 2019), among others.
 
She has also participated in various group exhibitions, including DMA CAMP 《Unseen》 (Daejeon Creative Center, Daejeon, 2023), 《Daily Life not so simple》(Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《summer love》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2019), 《Gwangju Hwaru-10 Artists’ Exhibition》 (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2018), and 《Story Blossoms in Art》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2016).
 
Sang A Han’s works are included in the collections of the Seongnam Cultural Foundation, FOUNDRY SEOUL, SONGEUN, and the OCI Museum of Art.

References

• 한상아, Sang A Han (Artist Website)
• 파운드리, 한상아 (FOUNDRY, Sang A Han)
• 위켄드, [작가 노트] 낯선 사이 (WEEKEND, [Artist Note] Unfamiliar Space)
• 공예문화, 먹과 바느질로 그리는 여성의 서사: 한상아의 세계, 2024 겨울호
• 아트바바, 송은아트큐브 – [서문] 낯선 파동 (Artbava, SONGEUN ARTCUBE – [Preface] Unfamiliar Wave)
• OCI 미술관, [서문] 뽀족한 용기 (OCI Museum of Art, [Preface] Pointed Warmth)
• 파운드리 서울, [서문] 뾰족한 온기 (FOUNDRY SEOUL, [Preface] Pointed Warmth)
• 메종코리아, 기억의 흔적, 2024.09.02
• 비애티튜드, 날카롭지만 무디고, 무디지만 날카로운