Installation view © SONGEUN ARTCUBE

Sang A Han paints unfamiliar landscapes where ordinary incidents and emotions that anyone might experience are mixed with fantasy. The artist’s narrative, dyed with multiple layers of meok, metaphorically contains the anxieties faced in establishing identities as a parent and as a woman artist, while at the same time discovering and illuminating hope within them.

There are experiences that anyone might have, yet whose weight never becomes light. The points of concern the artist encounters through marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth are highly intimate narratives, but because such changes are ones any woman can experience, they are reborn as universal stories. The solo exhibition 《Unfamiliar Relationship》 (Weekend, 2018), which presented a different tenor from past works by unraveling ominous imaginings or anxieties about disasters that have not occurred through a romantic lens, expressed the complex, subtle sentiments of pregnancy—joyful, but far from simply happy. What must be noted throughout these processes is the artist’s method of making.

Trained in traditional Korean painting, her process somewhat reflects traditional women’s housework such as sewing or laundry. She stitches unbleached cotton cloth to connect the seams between pieces, presses them flat with ironing, then soaks parts in water or wets them with a spray bottle to dye them with meok. In a time-intensive process, in order to carry out the roles of mother and artist simultaneously, she adopts active methods beyond merely applying meok and waiting for it to dry. While the fabric dries, she cuts out completed images again with scissors and stitches them between works, or makes mobiles composed of dolls—ways of finishing works within set times that reveal her identities as both artist and parent.


Installation view © SONGEUN ARTCUBE

This exhibition 《Unfamiliar Wave》 unfolds, within a world where metaphor and fantasy are intermingled, the events that sent great waves through the artist’s life using the same working method. Unfamiliar Wave 1 (2019), which surrounds the exhibition hall, reconstructs images that appear in her early works and compresses, into the artist’s own symbolic signs, the events that sent ripples through her life—marriage, childbirth, and childrearing—divided into a total of three configurations. The first evokes the period of calmly enjoying a life alone, without major waves; through marriage and childbirth, it depicts, by borrowing mythic elements, the relationships among mother, artist herself, and the artist’s child. The artist’s memories and experiences cling to the body, seeping into the skin like patterns, becoming included within life’s narrative.

Finally, like a candle that burns itself to brighten and warm those around it, they are likened to the warm fruition of childrearing. The end of the narrative becomes a cycle that restarts when viewers who have made one circuit of the exhibition space encounter Unfamiliar Wave 2 (2019) at the window gallery. In this way, the artist’s autobiographical tale expands into a story of life and death that repeats without end. Installed on the opposite side, Unfamiliar Wavelength (2019) protrudes fragmentarily from part of the narrative, adding coziness to the space. The abstract mobile dolls floating in a space of deep meok-black embody the artist’s sensibility, evoking a warm feeling as if in a soft cradle.

Sang A Han’s works, which contain meok in myriad densities, are filled with inscrutable unfamiliar patterns against unfamiliar spaces. These are patterns formed from the artist’s own memories that we cannot know. What kinds of patterns, seeping into our skin through each of our experiences, do we carry? / (Lawrence Jefferies Co., Ltd, Jung Pooreuna)

References