Hwang Saejin

Hwang Saejin,  b. 1982

Korean artist Hwang Sae-Jin’s visual feast seems hard to digest at first. “When people see how my work fills the canvas, it has a dizzying effect,” says Hwang. Her tightly bunched flowers, clothes and cloth fragments ask to be disentangled, but in the confusion her statement becomes clear. Her collages are an explosion of fashion and manufactured goods. Such domestic scenes make wardrobes into microcosms of consumer desires. And despite the busy overflow, there’s an uncertainty with an emptiness that product lines cannot fill. “In such floral imagery we can see the artifice of modern civilisation,” said Hwang. “It is losing the scent of real beauty in a paradoxical way. I think artists need to empathise with different aspects of the modern world. My work expresses the emptiness of excessive consumer desires.”