Artist Statement
How do we reconcile with the ghosts of our past and envision a livable future in a world that keeps ending? Invoking Korean shamanic rituals and folk mythologies, my work summons the forces and agents that have shaped our intergenerational pain and resilience in a speculative space. In that space, poignantly charged images and strange voices of potential transformation are radically evoked like potent spells. Animate objects, unnamed heroines, hungry spirits, and mythical beings are called upon in allegorical narratives and magical compositions to conjure a vision of fantastic fissures in patriarchal, colonial, and materialist oppressions. Together, they cast a palpable presence to what has been repressed and erased from the dominant social consciousness, toward a collective healing.
Bio
Yunjin La-mei Woo is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who examines what it means to be human or otherwise through allegories of contagion, haunting, and conjuring. Born as a granddaughter of a Korean shaman, Woo is interested in summoning a different image of who we may become by dealing with who we have been. She investigates how images of the infectious, insane, or supernatural intersect with issues of power, gender, class, and ethnicity. To this end, Woo pays special attention to the everyday as a politically charged site where the dominant ideology is not only affectively felt and but also infected by unexpected aberrations and creative ruses. Her research-based work encompasses video, performance, drawing, sound, installation, writing, and social interventions.
Woo received her MFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University and PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington. Her creative work and writing have been exhibited, screened, and published nationally and internationally. Woo is currently Associate Professor of Art at the Metropolitan State University of Denver.
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