Elisa Carollo, The Poetics of Materials in Hannah Woo’s Work

Hannah Woo’s sculptures are bodies in motion, animated characters of a personal mythology that already inhabits a generative hybridity between human and nonhuman, between the artificial and the biological. Her sensorial, symbol-laden assemblages pulse with liveliness yet carry a haunting, ominous weight—anchored in fantasy, in that metaphorical third realm of dreams and fairy tales where the alien and the unknown can still take form, find existence, and endure.

We might describe Woo’s sculptures through the art-historical notion of assemblage, which embraces the generative co-presence of heterogeneous elements that, in their dialectical tension, yield emergent effects and new symbolic meanings. Woo’s works have often been read as metaphors for the body. Her use of fabric, the very texture of the textiles and tissues she selects, evokes corporeality while collapsing distinctions between interior and exterior. Her creatures most often appear as fragmentary forms, transforming into porous membranes where the visceral meets the external, and the individual hybridizes with the “other.”

In her earlier series, Woo focused particularly on female experience, probing the vulnerabilities and challenges of the women’s body across ages, as well as the very nature of its perception and expression within the societal fabrics that shape its form. Her work at the time could be read as symbolic commentary on the condition of women in Korean society—at once hyper-manipulated and artificialized under beauty standards of perfection, yet bound by deeply traditional codes governing bodily relations, manners, and behavior. At the core lay an unresolved tension between self-love and the desire for improvement, and self-violence born of familial and societal pressures toward optimization, as Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in The Burnout Society. Woo’s material reflections on bodies and control resonate with Han’s claim that late capitalism has shifted us from Foucault’s disciplinary society of external coercion to a performance society of the self—where repression yields to self-imposed demands for achievement, improvement, and optimization. The result is a form of auto-aggression, an endless cycle of correction and striving that frequently culminates in exhaustion, collapse, burnout, or depression.

Most recently, in creating these morphing sculptural bodies, Woo has extended her inquiry beyond the human realm, probing a broader system of relations that living beings establish with their material and physical surroundings, and the vital networks that emerge from them. In this context, she both acknowledges and pushes against the physical limits of her materials, amplifying their expressive potential. The sculptures acrobatically stretch and occupy space, freed from the constraints of gravity or “good posture,” manifesting as “irresponsible forms” that confront fragility while stoically resisting physical and psychological collapse. Woo herself, a longtime ballet practitioner, is drawn to the relentless repetition of “posture”—the endless striving to perfect the body and behavior in order to conform to societal standards and expectations. Through this lens, she problematizes the relationship between body, space, and labor, showing how transformation is often dictated by the need to adapt to one’s environment. “We are all placed in different circumstances and environments, and accordingly, the shape of our lives and the timing of their transformations appear in various ways,” she reflects.

In her most recent works, Woo heightens this dramatic tension, and with it the individuality of her creatures, casting them as divas on a stage. By exaggerating posture and stretching bodies beyond their natural limits, they enact a kind of expressionist overperformance, exposing the absurdity of endless self-optimization while reaching toward an existence that transcends human-imposed constraints and categories, rebelling against the very notion of a finite or fixed body. Yet, as they animate the space, Woo’s sculptures seem to join a cosmic dance, a symbiotic ballet in which each figure claims its own voice and role in the ensemble while remaining part of a broader, fluidly horizontal ecosystem of complementary forces and vital relations.

Theatrical and deliberately choreographed, Woo’s latest exhibition POOMSAE stages a series of forced encounters between matter and self, as the sculptures assume character and meaning through a dialectical relation with their viewers. While works from Bleeding and Milk and Honey (2023), dispersed across the gallery, appear tormented by internal or external forces and diseases, others assert themselves as voracious feasts, fully agentic in the space, confronting both viewer and surroundings. A striking example is the self-destructing diva in demi-pointe, Demi-Pointe—a central piece titled after the ballet position—that perfectly embodies this tension between the disciplined effort to perform and a primordial urge to rebel, revealing instead a truer essence.

Meanwhile, playing through the gallery’s space was Maurice Ravel’s Bolero (1928): a hypnotic composition built almost entirely on a single theme that repeats obsessively over a steady snare drum rhythm. With each cycle, new instruments join, layering into a gradual crescendo that swells from a hushed opening to an overwhelming climax. Mechanical, sensual, and unrelenting, the piece evokes the Sisyphean effort of existence itself—an endless exercise in adaptation and refinement, where repetition becomes both a discipline of survival and an attempt at a harmony that aims for transcendence, beyond the body’s limits.

As Woo explains, her creative process begins with an intuitive, almost spontaneous encounter with materials, embracing what Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter calls “thing-power”—the agency of matter to suggest its own direction, its soul, its call, and what it might transform into in a new symbolic life. “When I touch the fabric, I’m very skinship with my fabric material, and very intuitive in the relation with it,” she notes. As a student, when asked by her professor how she had made a sculpture, she could only reply that she didn’t know—it must have happened almost by itself. It must have been fairies, magic, making them. Fabric, for her, has always carried an endless imaginative and sensorial potential, a capacity to expand into new forms of being.

Her recent works on paper—drawings of pastel and gouache presented for the first time in her most recent show as individual works—unleash this imaginative energy even more freely, vibrant chromatic bursts and explosions of force that reveal a still looser release of imaginative currents. There is, unmistakably, a magical dimension in Woo’s process, a kind of clairvoyance that allows her to tune into spiritual and archetypal worlds, drawing on a collective imagination and shared subconscious that emerges through symbols beyond rational or conventional codes. At the same time, her practice—and the sculptural results it yields—embraces a fundamental principle of entropy: that everything originates and eventually returns within a cyclical flow of birth, evolution, and destruction to which all matter, organic or inorganic, is subject.

Ultimately, the drama Woo stages in the space signals a desire to exceed the limits of ordinary human perception and physicality, while at the same time inviting viewers to engage both physically and narratively through the symbolic cues she weaves into the environment—cues that activate subconscious memory and embodied response. Colorful, sensual liquids and secretions seem to spill from her sculptural bodies, at once mysterious, poisonous, or purifying. They infiltrate the gallery like parasitic presences, or else bloom as luminous efflorescences and nutritive streams—reminders of the vitality of natural life, which always exceeds human-constructed reality and its contaminations of an original symbiotic balance.

In this sense, Woo’s sculptures become sites where tensions are materially negotiated—the push and pull between discipline and rebellion, between human and nonhuman, between psyche and body, material and spiritual. Woo’s sculptures just resist any final binary resolution, instead embracing the fertile ambiguities that arise in the blurring of genders, species, and even life-forms. Moving fluidly through these in-betweens, Woo’s practice stages a form of “vital materialism,” one that confronts the liveliness of matter and reflects the inherently interrelational nature of existence itself: bodies as parts of a wider entanglement of substances, energies, and forces in continuous motion and transformation, a shared evolutionary effort toward survival and adaptation.