SEMI,SU, mixed media (synthetic fiber, website, inkjet print), 2025
Lookbook
Hansol's grandmother regularly crocheted dish scrubbers using brightly colored yarn commonly found in South Korea and distributed them to the women in her family, including the artist. The artist became interested in how women’s labor often serves as a means of enabling further labor, as well as in the contradiction that scrubber yarn, used for cleaning dirty dishes, can appear excessively beautiful.
Scrubber yarn is colorful, glittering, and coarse in texture. In this work, the scrubber is detached from its practical function and combined with high fashion, emphasizing its decorative and glamorous qualities. High fashion, or haute couture, is characterized by its artistic and impractical nature, with garments produced in limited quantities by skilled artisans. Likewise, for 'SEMI, SU', a master craftswoman, the artist’s grandmother, created only seven garments by hand.
A tool intended for domestic labor is transformed through the hands of an artisan into an artistic garment that foregrounds spectacle and ornamentation.
Each garment is intentionally restrictive: some are heavy, others excessively long, and some fit so tightly that they impede movement. Visitors are invited to wear the garments and directly experience the burden and responsibility of domestic labor through physical sensations of discomfort, pressure, and constraint.
The garments are available for purchase through an online store. The high-fashion brand “SEMI, SU” symbolizes individuals who have been indoctrinated by domestic labor and who have, metaphorically, become dominated by the scrubber itself.
Photoshoot
