Hannah Woo
Bag with You_Stroller
Since 2019, Bag with You has emerged as one of Hannah Woo’s signature series, conceptualizing wearable fabric objects or bags fashioned after organs. The 5 pieces in the series of Bag with You are wearable sculptures, acting as captivating external representations of internal organs and genitals. Sparked by the artist’s realization of a missing kidney, this series crafts a unique organ-clothing-device fashioned after human organ shapes, detachable at will. Upon being worn, these pieces manifest as fresh bodily extensions. The wearer morphs into a fusion of person and object, or a being with externally, artificial organs. The artist perceives these as totemic objects that are unveiling and alleviating the artist’s unease about her own body’s imperfections. Many iterations of becoming take place in Woo’s work, Bag with You represent a process of becoming non-human (a process “involution” from human to non-human forms): organs, cysts, slices of flesh, animals, plants, or fictitious mythical creatures. This journey is akin to a mutually anomalous cycle of becoming-women > becoming-animal > becoming-minoritarian > becoming-mutants. It is a cycle that brings soft touches and feminine expressions back into untamable tentacles and thorns, and back again.