About
Woo Jin Joo is a mixed-media artist, with a specialty in textiles and embroidery art. Originally from Seoul, Korea, she moved to London in 2014 for further education in BA Textiles at Central Saint Martins and continued her studies in MA Textiles at the Royal College of Art. Woo Jin is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary artist, recently winning the Janome Fine Art Textiles Prize, and exhibiting at Craft Central in London and Dutch Design Week.
Influenced by Asian philosophies, traditions, and culture, Woo Jin’s work investigates the relationship we have to the ordinary objects in our daily lives. As Freya Mathews wrote in ‘Post-Materialism’, ‘In pre-materialist societies, there was a depth of meaning and a feeling for the profound mystery and poetry of human existence that tends to be lacking in materialist societies.’ Exploring how we perceive value in our consumerist society, her practice seeks to re-enchant and to recover a lost poetry in the everyday objects that are overlooked, unnoticed, replaceable or disposable. Transforming these items by working directly into and onto them, Woo Jin brings these ordinary objects to life, gives them their own character and voice, and in doing so, encourages us to reassess their value in our day-to-day lives.
Her recent ‘Dokkaebi’ series is inspired by Korean mythological creatures, also known as ‘Korean Goblins’, which are told to have formed from a spiritual possession of an inanimate object. By animating found objects in an unexpected way, Woo Jin suggests alternative views on our relationship with objects, contrasting from our current consumeristic material culture.
