Han Oh

The Korean Human wear designer and artist, Han Oh completed their BA in South Korea and shifted to London to study fashion for Graduate diploma at Central Saint Martins.

Working on a Master's research at Royal College of Art, he commenced experimenting skin layers, the relationship with their tattooed body and green screen effect. After 'Mirror Mirror' project at RCA, Han Oh turned his attention to research work, exploring new approaches and resources to use in his work. With this activity, He aimed to discover types of leather that could be used as another skin layer to people for being invisible and free. To do so, He honed his skills at tattooing on leather.

Also, he wanted to invent something that could be beautifully hand crafted and appeared playful interpretation of the infinity at the same time. Such work by him is observed in a piece called Another face, a helmet. Their work wittily shares the infinite possibilities of gender identity and the lives of real-life transgender people in Korean society.

After curating a Final show, he aims to renovate home a studio for working materials developments. 

‘Invisibility of gender minority’

I blend green screen effect into garments to expand the realm of digital wear design. I wanted to challenge traditional making fashion material methods by introducing green screen effect. The idea was sparked after seeing a physical scene on a film set with endless options. I was working on a design for a service that would allow customers to design and customise their own name tags with 3D modelling, when I was thinking about how my material relates to my body, sexuality, and my gender identity. 

As a gender minority person, I would observe my body modification as a medium for identity; weaving multiple ideas to indicate gender society’s reality. Since the human body (material) does not have a green color, we use green as a green screen effect, which gives me a color that symbolizes infinity in the real world, hence the title "invisibility and infinity". 

Within it, I capture identity in green colour, exploring invisible transgender people in Korea and growing up as a queer in a small community. It is the materials evoking me to study and develop an infinite number of real-world materials; Tattooed vegetable tanned cow hide leather, translucent leather, Turkish green leather, silicone rubber, piercing and so on. I have tried not only repelled the methodological stereotype of fashion, but it lured in a whole of papers about the reality of transgender people in Korean society to realise the vision. Alongside vegetable tanned leather, multiple types of leather and tattoo ink, I tattooed with tattoo machine their edited body footage from the colours of green screen colour, ensuring that all artwork on leather was hand drawing.