Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present 《Portals》, a solo project by Korean Canadian artist Sun Woo, at Frieze London Focus section 2024, booth F34. As an immigrant and a digital native, the artist interweaves migrating experiences across cultural and technological boundaries to address the concept of belonging and estrangement within the real and virtual space. Showcasing a series of paintings and sculptures made of bronze, engraved wooden bricks, sourced neglected objects and other miscellaneous materials, this presentation continues on the artist’s ongoing interest in exploring the body and society as a site of continuous transitions, hybridity, and obscuration of boundaries by converging her corporeal fragments with objects, landscapes and technologies of personal history and memory. The immersive fabricated scenery within the booth–composed of anonymous wilderness and obscure devices from the past–highlights the proximity that lingers between fiction and history, transcending the limitations of the body to evoke a sense of nostalgia in relation to sensory memories.

For this exhibition, the conceived works allude to transitional spaces that interconnect the human body, society and nature amid different forms floating in multifaceted realities and textures. Influenced by her time spent living and working in Canada and South Korea, Sun Woo’s work illustrates the constant migratory state between the physical now and the abandoned before. At the same time, they register the feeling and effect of technology on bodies and memories. For the artist, both her cultural identity and technology are elements that create connection and distance, simultaneously making her a subject and object, an engaged participant and a stranger in society.

Often sourcing personal memories, physical images and personal data of others freely available on social media platforms, Sun Woo merges these disparate remnants together through digital-like process of alterations and edit, to create a mediated interface on her canvas. While her microscopic precision of detail obfuscates the “realness” of her canvas paintings to that of a Photoshop artifice, the prolonged physical labor to transform her digital collages into traditional modes of presentation– painting and sculpture–depict a longing to delay and obstruct the fleeting and transient nature of the contemporary condition. Through this synchroneity between technique and technology, Sun Woo opens a liminal space where the experience of duality is possible, sparking a nuanced reflection on both internal and physical dislocation.

In her large-scale paintings, Sun Woo merges bodily elements with geological formations like sea caves, coniferous forests and objects, both vintage and modern, to form mesmerizing visual paradoxes that defy conventional logic. The Chorus (2024), which details orchestra instruments submerged in a sea cave, evokes a feeling of displacement between civilization and nature, the interior and the exterior, the familiar and the strange. These objects are further embedded with human-like features: hair drooping from the grand piano, smoke exhaled through the flute, and water expelled like bodily fluid from the horn. While such detail encourages one to relate to one’s own body, the overall hybridity breeds a sense of anxiety, impotence, and decay related to human transience instead of intimacy.

At the same time, there is an undercurrent of violence toward the body that repeatedly haunts her works. The effect appears most pronounced in Shivers (2024); the slit within the haystacks of which bears an uncanny resemblance to the female orifice or an open wound, is brutally penetrated by twigs, while robotic snow blowers chill these bodies in extreme closeups. Such catastrophism reappears in her other works, as seen in Rest (2024), the rocks’ colossal weight tensions a supporting braid from the trampoline bed to the brink of snapping; and in Mother and Child (2024), a vintage scale weighs between two portions of hair which, as implied by its title, belong to a mother and her offspring. In all three cases, Sun Woo weighs down and overwhelms components of the female body to elicit a mediated condition of one’s memory, history and identity, playing on such mismatch in order to reflect the politics of female sexuality. She also depicts these figures as stranded in unknown wilderness, recollecting the landscapes of the suburban West where she grew up as the only woman of color, portraying them as places of both nurture and menace. Alongside the implications of gravity and mortality, these in-between states also suggest fissures in rigid boundaries, highlighting moments of potential rupture.

Amongst these works which interrogate the concept of the constrained body in states of transcendence, Sun Woo’s sculptures underscore such tension between the construction and subordination of the female body. Here, the artist subjects her own body to physical objects and structures imbued with historical narrative, evoking a sense of dislocation beyond individual control that is freight with subject matter related to the Asian female identity and experience. In the presentation’s central piece, Portal (2024), she incorporates a vintage Korean bucket with modern prefabricated materials, wooden bricks, synthetic hair and 3-D printing technology to reconstruct a traditional well. At the bed of the structure rests a portrait of the artist, her face emerging from within, skin anemic and half buried in the water. Structurally, the work alludes to the polarizing symbolism of wells between Eastern and Western folklore. By confining herself inside the well, her face pressed against the surface of the water struggling to push through, Sun Woo reveals the abjectness of the self, existing neither as subject nor object, but as a permeable entity reflecting whatever stands opposite the portal.

Similarly, in Echo (2024), where the artist casts her own self-image onto the string of traditional Korean bronze bells, each bell is designed to be fixed in its place and hung still. Its extreme weight and forced silence allegorise the suppression of female voice, and the body’s forced integration with its collective history of suffering. Both sculptures stand as a convergence of body, sculpture and historical artifact, situating the viewer within opposing discourses relating to the representation and treatment of women historically and culturally.

Altogether, Sun Woo’s works appear grandiose and composed on the surface. Yet intuitively, they evoke a sense of danger, entrapment, and vulnerability, displacing the viewer into a state of otherness. Her works function as an umbilical cord, reorienting the viewer toward visceral feelings that nourish and cherish within all things, thereby reflecting the body’s relationship with external worlds. Ultimately, they reveal how individuals and consciousness are once again shaped and restricted by the technologies and beliefs created by humans, with no way to escape.

References

• 갤러리 배이컨시, 프리즈 런던 (영국) 
  (Gallery Vacancy at Frieze London, UK)