Sun Woo at Make Room

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Sun Woo, Salamander’s Cottage (detail) (2023). Acrylic on canvas, 84.5 × 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Jong Hyun Seo.

In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-spanning 1982 book Dictée, the Korean American artist writes: “Being broken. Speaking broken. Saying broken. Talk broken. Say broken.”¹ Cha, who was born in South Korea but lived abroad until her death, felt “broken” from her native language and country, an experience that necessitated the highly experimental language in Dictée and elsewhere. Were Cha alive today, she might find a listening ear in Sun Woo, a South Korean painter whose cross-genre artworks recall—and invent—diverse narratives that address her own contemporary displacement. In Sun Woo’s Los Angeles solo debut at Make Room, Swamps and Ashes, a fantastical, threatening hybridity emerged. Humans became objects and objects became human, forming fraught new landscapes defined by the surreal merging of people, places, and products. Across these paintings, Sun Woo examines the body and the home as sites of painful transformation, their various expressions colliding within each haunting canvas.

Sun Woo employs a variety of aesthetic modes to explore the body’s turbulent relationship to its ever-changing environment. In Salamander’s Cottage (all works 2023), a pair of disembodied wooden legs carved with decorative florals stands amidst a blaze as a blackened wood-burning stove burns giant, airbrushed flames that flare up around an open laptop computer perched in the foreground. Replete with intricate detail in a desaturated palette, some parts of the composition recall the gothic styling of romance novels, but the computer’s screen also evokes our hyper-connected present day. Sun Woo’s unique visual vernacular creates a chaotic pastiche that both alienates and punishes the body. In Dawn in the Grove, an iron shoots airbrushed steam across a shiny mat of long black hair that lays over a wooden ironing board as if it’s been freshly pressed—the hair’s glossy sheen is reminiscent of styles found in popular manga. The resulting assemblage uses American street aesthetics, seen in Sun Woo’s gestural, graffiti-like airbrush, and Asian comic forms to depict a transplanted body part—hair—within a generic pastoral locale. These multivalent compositions reflect Sun Woo’s biography: She emigrated to Canada from South Korea as a child and attended art school in New York before returning to Seoul, where she now resides. If the resulting stylistic admixture feels disorienting, that may be the point: Each painting culls an array of media, memories, and references from Sun Woo’s transnational repertoire, creating scenes that emphasize the body’s instability.

Sun Woo’s eclectic paintings conjure the multiplicity of her source material, an amalgamation in which the body covertly appears in shapes and fragments, interpolated by—or into— an array of everyday objects. A sense of violence also often accompanies these disjointed images of the self. In Brittle Landscape, hilly, pear-shaped mounds of straw are cleaved by hairdryers and metal nails, forming holes that look like vulvas; flames emerge from a hairdryer’s fan at the canvas’ bottom edge, about to set the view ablaze. In Room of Haze, a high-tech steamer encircles a drying rack adorned with ‘clothing’ that appears to be made from maimed bodily surfaces: tank tops fashioned from stitched, bloody skin; a large blanket covered in deep, fleshy pores. An implied threat similarly accompanies pareidolic artworks like The Cleanse, in which a trio of iridescent snails circles a sink drain that loosely resembles a person’s eye. Numerous narratives immediately spring to mind, each suggesting the possible intermingling of human and object. In Sun Woo’s work, the body and its often domestic environment are in constant battle—a war that produces recombinant forms marked with the violence of their becoming.

In Cha’s short video, Mouth to Mouth (1975), which was shown alongside one of Sun Woo’s 2022 paintings in a group show at Seoul’s N/A Gallery, a close-up, staticky shot of the artist’s mouth shapes eight Korean vowels. Slowly, the teeth and lips begin to resemble other images: a rocky hole, a clenched fist. Sun Woo’s paintings are different than Cha’s artworks in tone and texture, but their depictions of displacement share in their address of the transplanted body, situating migration as a process that fragments representation either in language (as in Cha) or painting (as in Sun Woo). Sun Woo, as Cha might say, “paints broken”—her rogue combination of genres and surreal figuration conjure a bodily condition marked by perpetual, violent change. Sun Woo’s work displays the instability of domesticity —the home becomes a near-unrecognizable, tumultuous place where people and products are permeable, their porous boundaries shifting under pressure. In this way, Sun Woo offers a corporeal parallel to notions of displacement and migration. What first appears as an empty living room or rural landscape quickly becomes an expression of the body, which might manifest, too, as a threatening, dislocated household object: an unruly hairdryer, perhaps, or a laptop, slowly burning away.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 35.

Sun Woo, Swamps and Ashes (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Nice Day Photo.

Sun Woo, Dawn in the Grove (2023). Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 78.75 x 134 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Jong Hyun Seo.

Sun Woo, Swamps and Ashes (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Nice Day Photo.

Sun Woo, Swamps and Ashes (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Nice Day Photo.

Sun Woo, The Cleanse (2023). Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 39.25 x 31.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Jong Hyun Seo.

Sun Woo, Room of Haze (2023). Acrylic on canvas, 84.5 x 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Jong Hyun Seo.

Sun Woo, Long Shower (2023). Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 84.5 x 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Jong Hyun Seo.

Sun Woo, Brittle Landscape (installation view) (2023). Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 79 x 118 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Nice Day Photo.

Claudia Ross is a writer from Los Angeles. Her fiction and arts criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, The Baffler, VICE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. She is a regular contributor at ArtReview and Frieze.

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