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.
