Don’t Miss: Hannah Woo’s Hybrid Bodies Confronting Adaptation Beyond the Human

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1581756" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/G-Gallery_POOMSAE_Installation-view-5.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Sculptural installation featuring a large red flower-like form with white and black center, surrounded by smaller colorful fabric constructions on the floor and wall." width="970" height="646" data-caption='An installation view of Hannah Woo’s “POOMSAE” at G Gallery in Seoul. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy of G Gallery</span>’>

Hannah Woo’s sculptures are bodies in motion, animated figures of a personal mythology that inhabit a generative hybridity between human and non-human, artificial and biological. Her extravagant, chameleonic assemblages stage the co-presence of heterogeneous forces that produce new symbolic entities, capable of prefiguring alternatives for horizontal, fluid ecologies and symbiotic environments.

Year after year, Woo’s practice has drawn increasing attention; she broke onto the international stage after winning Frieze Seoul’s Bulgari Prize. In her soon-to-close exhibition at G Gallery in Seoul, she heightens the theatricality of her sculptures, transforming the gallery into a staged encounter with monstrous bodies that eerily echo human and natural behavior. “POOMSAE” invites visitors to confront the monstrous—the alien, the “other,” as described by Jacques Derrida: a threshold moment where fear and fascination collapse into one. The alien reveals itself not as a purely negative pole generating horror but as the irruption of the unforeseen—an arrival of something unexpected that unsettles the border between self and other, human and non-human, until the categories begin to slip.

Woo’s sculptures are anchored in fantasy, that metaphorical third realm of dreams and fairy tales where the alien and the unknown can still take form, find existence and endure. They emerge and grow intuitively under her hands, guided by vision and shaped through a particular kinship with material. “When I was at school, I used to tell my teacher that fairies made my work,” she tells Observer. “I really like to touch the fabric—I feel a kind of kinship with it. I work intuitively, letting the material guide me, so the work seems to generate itself in the moment.”

If in the past her sculptures leaned toward the enigmatic, their meanings encapsulated within tightly wrapped bodies, this new exhibition amplifies their character and attitude with striking intensity. “I’m really focused on these characters as beings with something hidden inside,” she adds.

To this end, Woo has fashioned them as if made of milk and honey: malleable, amorphous, porous creatures that swell within the gallery space, bleeding serum or venom as they press against their own boundaries. From this impulse comes the title “Bleeding and Milk and Honey,” an ongoing series that began in 2023 and has now expanded with new works conceived for this exhibition. Colorful, sensual fluids seep from these bodies, their essence elusive—at once poisonous and purifying—contaminating the gallery like parasitic presences or vital efflorescences and nourishing streams.

The works in the show are deliberately dramatic, locked in a struggle with forces that agitate and torment from within, straining against the confines of body and psyche. “So much of life feels dramatic,” Woo says, “and I see that drama everywhere.” Her sculptures channel this intensity, embodying a raw existential tension that refuses containment.

In earlier works, Woo centered a distinctly female perspective, probing the challenges, vulnerabilities and shifting perceptions of the body across time and how the social fabrics that dictate its form constrain its expression. Her sculptures in that context could be read as symbolic commentaries on the condition of women in Korean society: bodies subjected to relentless manipulation and artificialization under beauty standards demanding perfection, while also bound by traditional codes of manners and behavior.

At the core lies an unresolved tension between self-love and the drive for improvement, and self-violence and masochism, often born of familial and societal pressures for optimization—pressures that, as Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in The Burnout Society, transform into self-exploitation. Walking Diva, a pivotal work titled after the ballet position en demi-pointe, embodies this strain between the disciplined effort to perform and a primordial impulse to rebel, exposing essential truth.

In her new series of morphing sculptural bodies, however, Woo extends her inquiry beyond the human frame, examining broader systems of relation between living beings, their material and physical environments and the vital networks that connect them. These sculptures twist and stretch acrobatically into space, defying gravity, rejecting any notion of “good” posture and embracing what she terms “irresponsible form”—at once fragile and resilient, capable of confronting collapse while resisting both physical and psychological disintegration. The tension they now hold speaks to a more profound existential rupture between the human and the non-human and the loss of a harmonious, symbiotic relation with nature’s cycles.

This time, viewers are not merely witnesses to a narrative unfolding before them. As Woo explains, the show places them alongside these characters, putting them in a shared space that demands direct confrontation with these alien forms—an unsettling encounter that may reveal something about our relation to “the other.” The gallery becomes a theater of vulnerability where the limits of flesh and material are exposed, underscoring how human existence depends not only on social systems but also on a broader ecology of interdependence with nature and other beings. Highly theatrical and deliberately choreographed, Woo orchestrates these encounters between matter and self, as her sculptures animate and gather meaning through their dialectical exchange with the viewer.

Resonating through the space is 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 almost 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 a gesture of transcendence.

Woo, a longtime ballet dancer, has long been drawn to this relentless insistence on “posture”—the perpetual striving to perfect body and behavior in accordance with societal standards and expectations. Through this lens, she unsettles the relationship between body, space and labor, exposing how transformation is often dictated by the need to adapt. “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 the exhibition essay.

The monstrous forms she conjures suggest that this tension—continuous adaptation, the unending fight for survival—is inescapable along the evolutionary path, for humans as much as for all other beings. Here, the viewer steps into a non-human, post-human world, where the Sisyphean struggle to conform to a singular, human-centered standard gives way to a necessary hybridization with other life forms, dictated by the inexorable force of nature.

Woo’s fabric-made creatures thus emerge as both ominous specters of possible futures and embodiments of an ongoing exercise in yielding to flux—learning to accommodate the flows of matter and energy as they shift toward new forms. “I’ve always sensed something more spiritual, even tormented, in the way they manifest in space—an insistence on the material’s own order, a kind of faith that the elements themselves must be allowed to find a new life,” she clarifies.

She presents a situation in which opposite and polarized beings—the living and the non-living, the protecting and the protected, the old and the young, the painful and the joyful—converge and complement one another in works that resist the limits of genre.

Ultimately, Woo’s sculptures become arenas where the fundamental tensions of contemporary existence are materially negotiated—the push and pull between discipline and rebellion, social performance and private drama and the human and the non-human. These works resist fixed binaries, instead embracing the generative possibilities that surface in the blurred spaces between genders, species and even disparate life forms.

Moving fluidly across these thresholds, Woo’s practice unfolds as an exercise in “vital materialism”—a staging of matter’s own liveliness and a reflection of the inherently relational nature of existence. Her work reveals bodies as part of a wider entanglement of materials, energies and forces in perpetual motion and transformation, a collective evolutionary effort toward survival within the vital mesh of interdependence.

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