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‘Vitalis Violentia’
HongKong
Exhibition Dates:
28 September—23 November 2024
Supported by Arts Council Korea @arkokorea
In 'Vitalis Violentia', the participating artists manipulate violence to shock, provoke, but more importantly, to employ it as a tool to disrupt the complacency of the audience, drawing attention to pressing social debates, and revealing the pervasive influence of violence in shaping our collective consciousness.
The artist‘s striking Agari (2024) made of coal black and burgundy red textile resembles a large flower bud opening up its body, with four tentacle-like petals protruding to its periphery. The soft sculpture, with its title meaning ’ascent‘ or ’rise‘ in Japanese, is installed at a high-up corner yet looking down at the viewer like a surveilling, encompassing (m)Other, reminiscing the jump scare moments in the horror movies where a close-up shot of the monstrous creature jolts the viewer with its bloody crimson maw.
Also influenced by Barbara Creed’s internationally acclaimed book ‘The Monstrous Feminine’, Woo transmutes the suspended floral sculpture into the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous—the female reproductive body— that waits for the unexpected moment to strike and symbolically castrate the masculine viewer.
Currently on view in ‘Vitalis Violentia’ at @podiumgallery, Hannah Woo’s @hannah.flashed.that painstakingly woven, metallic blue Bleeding Tungsten (2024) may symbolise women’s strength and commitment after going through patriarchal and racist oppressions. However, beyond the seemingly optimistic connotation, the viewer will find the blossom has viridescent bruises and oozing turquoise blood when looking up close.
Reminiscing South Korean poet Kim Yideum’s collection ‘Cheer Up, Femme Fatale’, which concurrently visualises the brutalised femme body as ‘...a plant that grows only when [it is] brutally mistreated’, Woo’s work represents the artist’s selfhood and manoeuvres self-initiated violence to reveal corporeal and psychic vulnerability. Such passivity introduces a fashion of feminism that does not resist through an active overthrow of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism, but one that functions through self-negation, self-disruption, and self-rupture, extending the violence to a critical turning point where such symbolic orders or even the loose sense of self has no place of existence.
Bruised, damaged, and deflowered, the soft sculpture subverts the notion of feminism through a masochistic process of unbecoming, presenting a potential alternative of womanhood that is incomprehensible within Western normative feminist discourse.