Hannah Woo’s fabric sculptures and “drawings” are perhaps direct descendants of craft-based productions that have occupied a peripheral position within the history of art—a history recorded and remembered predominantly by men. These craft objects, typically produced through the repetitive, mechanical gestures of female laborers, have long been regarded as the crude and modest results of aesthetic activities where the individual and concrete uniqueness of the “artist”—a term historically synonymous with “male”—could never emerge. In Woo’s case, fabric is by no means a “strategically” chosen material, yet her work shares in the devalued life and collective fate of craft objects. In other words, as long as she uses fabric—a “feminine” material—she inevitably accepts as part of herself the layered history of humiliation embedded within it.

From this perspective, Hannah Woo’s name could be written on the same page as those of feminist theorists and artists who, over the past centuries, have struggled in their own ways to reclaim or reappropriate the status of fabric—figures such as Miriam Schapiro, Rozsika Parker, Louise Bourgeois, and Faith Ringgold, as well as younger generations of “cool” women textile artists like Chiharu Shiota, Sarah Lucas, and Sarah Zapata.

However, no matter how severe the humiliation inflicted upon fabric—enough to legitimately question its qualification as an aesthetic object—fabric cannot be torn apart by insults alone. In fact, it is nearly impossible to completely destroy fabric. Fabric, which inevitably hangs or droops without resistance to gravity, makes its weightlessness and limitless flexibility its primary weapons. While heavy, solid “traditional” sculptures designed to attain monumental status eventually collapse and shatter, fabric at most becomes torn or soiled. Torn fabric can simply be sewn back together, and soiled fabric can be washed clean—allowing fabric to be perpetually regenerated. It’s much like the scene in Tim Burton’s animation The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), where Sally, after leaping from a tower and having her limbs ripped apart by the impact, calmly rises and sews her arms and legs back together with needle and thread. Through Sally’s stitching, the fabric mass filled with straw that had been strewn across the ground is quickly reconstituted as part of her body.

Sewing, in this way, cannot produce anything on its own, but by creating holes between disparate things and joining them together, it ensures that they are never the same as before. Objects reassigned (reassignment) through sewing do not disappear or get destroyed; rather, they transform into something other than themselves. Similarly, scissors—another indispensable tool in Woo’s practice alongside needle and thread—perform the internal work of division, splitting and fragmenting singular objects into multiples. Unlike the physical destructive force wielded by heavy tools designed for carving, shaping, or breaking, sewing and cutting embody the soft destructive power and passive aggression of “small, glimmering weapons” (Jang Hyejeong) that transform objects from within.

Through Woo’s stitching, two-dimensional fabric transforms into three-dimensional “sculpture,” living a second life as fabric-sculpture—whether or not they desire such a life. To reiterate, these forms can be perpetually regenerated, just as Sally’s “self-repair” ability forces her to live as the undead, never fully able to die.

In this way, the so-called “healing” nature of sewing can, on the other hand, be appropriated as the terrifying act of “reanimation”—bringing the dead back to life. The English word “reanimate,” formed by adding the prefix “re,” meaning repetition, to “animate,” which derives from the Latin “anima” (meaning soul or life), naturally recalls “animation,” a genre of visual media that makes still images appear to move. Within this context, it is not a stretch to view Hannah Woo—who, since her undergraduate years in 2011, has been “reviving” characters from childhood films and animations such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Dumbo, and Mary Poppins through her exhibitions—as a kind of “re-animator” akin to the figure in H.P. Lovecraft’s work. Like Herbert West, the mad scientist who seeks to reanimate the dead, Woo enacts a form of witchcraft through her fabric-sculptures, summoning beings that are no longer present into the exhibition space.

(Incidentally, Lovecraft’s Re-Animator directly references Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, perhaps indicating that the desire to “revive” the dead was originally cultivated through the witchcraft and alchemical practices of women.)

Witchcraft, in this sense, is another name for the radical imagination held by women surrealist artists who sought to create worlds beyond the here and now. Much like how Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington reappropriated “housework”—synonymous with feminized labor—as a revolutionary and creative laboratory through artistic “play” that might be called “alchemy of the kitchen” (Shin Hyesung), Woo’s practice aligns with this lineage. The collaboration between Varo and Carrington, who shared a cosmology of dreams and composed absurd yet fantastical recipes together, evokes Woo’s 2022 exhibition Feather (Cylinder) with artist Sujeong Jeong. Woo and Jeong built an exhibition based on an imaginative creation myth of an ancient female deity nurturing and guarding a mythical creature, a dragon. Woo, assuming that such a “legendary” creature would inevitably have been slain, crafted the dragon’s eyes and intestines from soft, pliable fabric-sculpture. This could perhaps be seen as an offering on an altar—intended to comfort or summon the creature once more.

The recursive motion of “reanimation” and “return” is a recurring motif throughout Woo’s body of work. According to Woo’s “official” career history, she began staging her object-sculptures on the “stage” of the exhibition space in a kind of theatrical or ritualistic form through installation art in her first solo exhibition “City Units” (2016). In this exhibition, the anthropomorphized object-sculptures seemed to glare out beyond the confines of the exhibition space—beyond the white cube—toward the city at large, embodying the shabby and pitiful emotions cast off from urban consumer lifestyles. As the material conditions under which these ghostly feelings and objects emerge as a kind of “return of the repressed,” the exhibition space is not merely a white cube. It becomes a vacant house, a squatted territory, where the object-sculptures—after the audience and even the “creator” artist have left—can finally begin their own raucous “party.”

In other words, Woo’s 2020 work PAJAMA PARTY (Superhero, Insa Art Space) was filled with traces of girl gangs who danced wildly, rampaged, and wrecked the space throughout the night. In this scene—where the exhibition space seems to be tolerating the daytime intruders, as though waiting for the “true owners” who will arrive only after the lights go out—the viewer becomes persistently aware of an absent someone, a someone not here now but soon to return.

These girls, “anti-heroes” (as opposed to male “heroes”), Dionysian “mad women” (Mainades), broom-wielding protestors, scarecrow sentinels, spirits and fairies, Dumbo and Mary Poppins, mythical beasts and goddesses, the (lost) body parts of someone—or perhaps Woo herself—seem destined to return, clad in the temporary bodies of object-sculptures. Already dead, never having existed, or existing only as fakes, these beings might “borrow” the bodies of object-sculptures to awaken in the darkened exhibition space and whisper conspiratorially. Within this context, Woo’s work maintains a continuum with animistic beliefs in everyday objects-turned-spirits or yokai, particularly the Japanese folklore of tsukumogami (付喪神)—household objects that, after many years, acquire a spirit or god within them.

According to Japanese folk belief, tsukumogami are inanimate objects that, after a long life, gain consciousness, sprouting limbs and chasing after their owners like living beings. In this sense, behind every name there follows a being, as happens in apostrophe—a rhetorical device where something absent is invoked, momentarily “activating” (animate) it as though alive within discourse. Woo momentarily activates the belief that these nonhuman, impersonal beings—exiled or rendered invisible by the logic of the real world—are alive and present with the audience in the exhibition space and will continue to exist even after the exhibition ends.
But here arises a question: Why does Hannah Woo wish to reanimate them? Why does she seek to introduce dreams, or another world that cannot coexist with life, into our lives?
 
 To answer this question, we must journey back into the past—a past that always contains Hannah Woo’s present. Woo’s undergraduate works, such as Amateur monster generation BULMANTORO (2010) and The Ghost (2011), resemble puppet plays in which gathered (small-sized fabric) objects perform specific roles. Her 2011 work I see an elephant fly can be described as a ritual that “reanimates” or “liberates” the main character, Dumbo the elephant, from Disney’s Dumbo (1941). Similarly, Inventing Numinose from the same year operates as a kind of summoning ceremony that provocatively tests the audience’s “belief” in the “transcendent.”

On the surface, it seems that since 2011 Woo has repeatedly re-staged the daydreams of a girl—not a woman, but a “child”—through the form of visual art, much like a Freudian subject fleeing into dreams to delay life itself. However, Woo’s desire is not to swap the positions of dream and reality, nor to assert the primacy of one over the other, but rather to make dream and reality exist “simultaneously.” This is an impossible desire—and yet, it is also a stubbornly “just” desire. For as long as dream and reality are entangled in an inseparable way, giving up one means surrendering both.

Thus, in I see an elephant fly, Woo burns Dumbo in order to “liberate” him from his fate of endless falling during the climax of Dumbo. Once “liberated,” Dumbo will no longer need to fall, nor narrowly escape death. The burning Dumbo (of reality) becomes another possible world for the falling Dumbo (of dreams). Reality is released from itself through dreams, and dreams are released from themselves through reality. The two worlds encounter each other through the burning Dumbo, and Dumbo is born again from his own death.

This activation of a special time-space—or a “gap”—that brings forth both the visible and invisible worlds, or the worlds of “reason” and “unreason” (to use Woo’s terms), simultaneously as divided realms of “here” and “there”—this might be Woo’s beautiful yet radical ambition as a “re-animator.”

 

References
Jang Hyejeong, “Having Only One,” 2020.
Shin Hyesung, “Mexican Women Surrealists: Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington,” Journal of Basic Design & Art, Korean Society of Basic Design & Art, 2019.

References

• 작가 홈페이지 (Artist Website)