Issy Wood’s Korean Debut

Issy Wood’s pictures flatten totems and trash on to the same plane, indexing the shifting lives of objects that have been worn in and burnished by the hands of time, attachment, love and loss. Often sourced from iPhone screenshots of pop culture as well as family heirlooms and self-portraits, her paintings are frequently interspersed with overlaid motifs such as the silver dials of vintage clocks (Study for I’m late, I’m late; Or so I’ve heard and Vanessa hates Easter, all 2022) or whimsically out-of-scale vegetables (as in the cabbage tea set in a recent work, or the asparagus punctuating the composition of a fur-trimmed coat in Study for outdoor dining, 2023). Wood’s subject matter consistently and obliquely denotes the realm of a lightly damaged girldom, like a Pinterest board on ketamine—lockets and high heels, half-eaten chocolate bunnies, pie crusts, kittens, birds and blouses, and the interior of a Tesla that within this constellation feels more like a quiet glimpse inside a woman’s handbag than a macho engine rev.

These contemporary still lives are infused with the hallucinatory tone of American gothic and captured in the artist’s signature approach of grayscale assemblage. Like post-impressionist Walter Sickert (1860–1942), who was instrumental in liberating modern British art from the constrictions of Victorian subject matter and who often sourced imagery from news clippings, celebrity culture, cosmopolitan ennui and domestic intrigue, Wood’s pictures borrow from the blurred space between outside and inside, online and IRL. They can also be read as accumulations or extensions of her diary entries, which she publishes online: “I’m in my car heading south to bring a coat to a specialist dry cleaner when a bizarre panic about crossing the river takes hold,” Wood writes in one. “In the end I clutch my dirty coat and loop home feeling wasteful, like I failed the errand. I think to make good on leaving the house by collecting *something*, so I buy extra slim cigarette filters and more bananas than anybody could ever need at a corner shop. A boy behind me in line says ‘hurry up, bitch’ and I feel a swell of pride that my hair has grown long enough to be visibly female.” (One could perform a lengthy psychoanalytic interpretation on the themes of impotence, phallic envy and femininity-as-masquerade in this dreamlike diary entry alone.)

The small daily failures that inflect Wood’s words and pictures make the meandering nature of writing this piece—reaching towards one thing and pulling back from another—feel resonant with the subject. It was suggested I connect Wood’s practice with a contemporary Korean artist’s, to situate it in the context of my motherland and birthplace. But more than anything, her work makes me think about my grandmother’s relationship to objects—how she’ll sometimes inexplicably fill premium storage space with empty cardboard boxes and decades-old, expired makeup, while hiding away framed family photographs, complaining of clutter. The value system she deploys in sorting objects from top to bottom drawer is one that often escapes me, but which I suspect is shadowed by her upbringing in 1940s Seoul. Back then the city was not the sleek cosmopolitan exporter of K-pop or luxury skincare, nor the site of art fairs like Frieze, but one that for many was closer to the third world than the first, where family inheritance was more likely to denote the transmission of memories of war and poverty than luxury goods or cultural capital. Wood’s pictures are being shown in a country that over the course of my lifetime (I was born the same year as Wood, in Seoul) has developed at a hyperaccelerated rate and rapidly transformed itself on the global stage. Nonetheless, the afterlives of war live on more quietly.

Just as the country’s evolution into an outpost of the global contemporary art market, culture and industry has disrupted and recalibrated the ways in which Korean subjectivity and history is read in the West, Wood’s process of artmaking reflects her negotiation with the matrix of symbols that comprise a person’s sense of self, and how these markers of selfhood are refracted from subject to object and back again. If the boundary between hoarding and collecting is one of value, categorization and historical specificity, the objects in these pictures toe the line between both. Certain works suggest cherished items loaded with ambivalent associations, as in what might be the family china in It’s gonna taste great (2022)—Wood has spoken of her grandmother as a woman “whose taste I hate but I want to take seriously”. Others, such as Louie pizza still life (2023), suggest goods captured immediately before they become refuse. Whether we choose to forget or rescue certain objects or moments from the rubbish bin of our unconscious, Wood seems to suggest that we have less control than we’d like to think, and that they are destined to reappear, transmuted and translated, in our dreams.

“Issy Wood: I like to watch” is on view at Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, from September 7–November 12.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week, Seoul 2023 under the headline 'Haunted Houses'

^{Main image: Issy Wood, Or so I've heard, 2022. © Issy Wood 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London, Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photograph: Damian Griffiths}