For Seoul-born artist Woo Jin Joo, the urban landscape of London is not merely a place of transit, but a vast, hidden archive of overlooked treasures and forgotten histories. While walking near her home or commuting to her studio in the South London district of Deptford, a battered end table left out on the curb or a single lost mitten resting on a pavement does not register as ordinary trash. Instead, these discarded remnants of daily life represent a rare and immediate opportunity for magic.
Joo is widely recognized for her distinct sculptural practice that bridges the gap between everyday domestic environments and the strange, haunting realms of folklore and mythology. Rather than actively hunting for specific raw materials, she allows encounters with discarded goods to happen by sheer happenstance. These accidental discoveries eventually take on profound personal significance, acting as catalysts that provoke her imagination and shape her artistic output.
This philosophy of spontaneous connection forms the bedrock of her creative process. In Joo’s view, the mundane fragments left behind by strangers harbor a distinct potential for meaning and transformation. By gathering furniture, discarded garments, and other abandoned artifacts, she initiates a dialogue between the past lives of these objects and her own internal landscape. It is through this intuitive gathering process, she suggests, that people ultimately conjure meaning in their own lives, turning the trivial into the transcendent.
In the studio, these retrieved items undergo a startling physical metamorphosis. Working with a tactile vocabulary that incorporates clay, wadding, wire, and shimmering viscose thread embroidery, Joo merges animal-like anatomies with domestic fixtures and hardware. The resulting sculptures are uncanny, straddling the line between the familiar and the utterly alien.
Among her striking creations are human-sized figures draped in meticulous costumes of white and beige fringe. These spectral entities often slump tiredly against the gallery floor or stand in quiet, patient repose against a wall, evoking the eerie sensation of waiting to be spoken to or on the verge of sudden movement. Other works cleverly synthesize organic body parts with bizarre structural forms. In "For Those Who Wade," completed in 2025, an ochre-colored arch decorated with viscose embroidery balances delicately on a pair of black suede boots. Similarly, the 2025 sculpture "Murmur" presents a totemic, fur-covered leg anchored by a ceramic foot, which is playfully topped with a small, carved wooden table.
This deliberate tapping into the surreal and the strange serves a deeper purpose for the artist. By embracing uncanny aesthetics, Joo seeks to transcend the ordinary limits of human perception. Her works invite viewers to explore how traditional folklore and mythology might offer alternative ways of acquiring knowledge, emotional resonance, and wisdom in a hyper-rational modern world.
This fluid, borderless approach to storytelling is deeply informed by her personal background. As a Korean-Chinese artist raised between two distinct cultures, Joo’s psyche and memory have been fundamentally shaped by the folklore, histories, and cultural narratives of East Asia. At the same time, the physical reality of living and working in London—and the immediate, tactile encounters she has with its streets and discarded objects—brings forth entirely new imagery, materials, and conceptual ideas. Her sculptures become a physical manifestation of this cross-cultural, in-between existence.
A crucial element of Joo’s artistic attraction to abandoned materials is their intrinsic history. Every piece of textile, every stray boot, and every broken table carries the memory of an unknown user and an unrecorded past. When these objects enter her studio, the artist assumes the role of an imaginative archivist. She is left to imagine, construct, and uncover meanings that are already embedded within the material’s history, even when she must rely purely on her own internal concepts to finish a piece.
Scale also plays a vital role in how these sculptures command space and engage their audiences. Several of Joo’s works are crafted to match the artist’s own height, introducing a physical presence and heft that smaller wall-mounted pieces simply cannot replicate. This deliberate choice in scale encourages viewers to actively navigate the gallery space, walking around the sculptures and measuring the physical volume of the artworks against their own bodies.
For Joo, these monumental dimensions add a layer of personal enchantment. The journey from initial ideation to physical production—watching something that previously existed only as a fleeting thought in her mind materialize into a fully animated, towering presence inhabiting the corner of her studio—remains one of the most rewarding aspects of her practice.
Art enthusiasts and contemporary sculpture fans currently have multiple opportunities to experience Joo’s enchanting creations firsthand. Those visiting London can view her solo exhibition, Bodily Inbetweenness, which is on display at Ruup & Form until November 13. Looking ahead to early 2027, her work is also scheduled to be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Harley Foundation in Nottinghamshire. For those unable to visit these exhibitions in person, the artist continues to share updates, studio insights, and documentation of her evolving sculptural practice through her Instagram account.
