Installation view © BYFOUNDRY

BYFOUNDRY is proud to introduce Seoul-based artist Sang A Han’s solo exhibition 《Pointed Warmth》, from October 22 to December 18, 2022. Sang A Han transforms the experiences and memories that permeate her inner world into works of meok (India ink) on cotton fabric, cutting and stitching the fabric in a performative process to create pieces with both two- and three-dimensional characteristics. In this exhibition, she presents five sculptural paintings and five painterly sculptures that capture the fundamental human wish for the well-being of the people and things we love.

Sang A Han’s work begins from the memory of everyday experiences and the emotions they engender. In the course of various life changes as an artist and woman, and also simply as an individual, she sometimes encounters a complex and nuanced emotion irreducible to a single word. She has said that these emotions “stick to the body, seeping into the skin like a kind of pattern.” Rather than sort this emotive memory into a logical, well-organized narrative, she draws out its fragmentary and contradictory aspects in a figurative and symbolic visual language.


Installation view © BYFOUNDRY

With the title 《Pointed Warmth》, this exhibition delves into the contradictory love produced by the double identity of artist and mother. 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. Although these works emerge from the intensely intimate experiences of the artist, the many facets of love examined here are layers of a more general emotion which all people feel about the things most precious to them. In this way, Sang A Han’s narrative creates room for empathy and expands into a universal story.


Installation view © BYFOUNDRY

With a background in traditional Korean painting, the artist works with meok and brush, thread and cotton fabric. She draws symbols, shapes, and patterns on the fabric in meok, then cuts them out along their outlines. Next, she uses black thread to stitch the drawings in layers onto a background of cotton fabric or join them together tightly into a three-dimensional object with multiple faces. The artist has said that “line is the essence of traditional painting,” and we can see in her work that lines created by meok and brush come together with lines created by needle and thread.

Just as the bodily strength of gripping the brush is reflected in lines drawn with meok, the lines of thread, which vary with how quickly they are pulled and tied, reveal the performative process by which the artist creates her pieces. While her sewing follows in the footsteps of feminist artists who have actively adopted techniques traditionally considered women’s housework, like embroidery and textiles, into the creative process, she also reinterprets this inheritance with big, sweeping movements. The daring meok lines, unhindered thread lines, and thick wrinkles produced by the taught pull of the thread on the cotton fabric come together tightly to form a picture that reveals the artist’s original style.

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