Labour Couture
Kyungmi introduces her studio Oori apparel where she explores the garment as a material that embodies both the passivity and agency of human existence and labor.
Growing up in a garment production environment in the 2000s, she witnessed the repetition and uniformity of mass production. Later, through couture training, she began questioning the bodily labor of making garments an inquiry that evolved into philosophical reflections and sculptural experimentation.
Today Kyungmi expands the repetitive gestures of folding, hanging, and displaying into a sculptural language within her conceptual framework Labour Couture.
Her installations disable the function of wearing, deconstructing and reassembling garments to visualize traces of labor. Through the accumulation of these gestures, display-like structures emerge, expanding from XS to XL and forming a landscape of labor.
She adopts the name Oori apparel from an actual first generation garment manufacturer (1999–2023) in Seoul, South Korea, reinterpreting it through her generational experience and artistic labor.
Reframing
Cleo approaches textiles through the lens of photography, guided by her fascination with balance, harmony, and repetition. Moving between documentary, still life, and fashion, she continually returns to the tactile and visual qualities of fabric: the shadows cast across its surface, the rhythm of folds, the way light is absorbed. In this project, she isolates fragments of fabric and gesture, revealing their quiet strength and aesthetic resonance.
Her photographs are not mere documents but her sophisticated artistic interpretations that translate labor gestures into another visual language.Through her lens, Cleo captures the aesthetic dimension of these acts, reframing repetition and form within the photographic image.
