From ceramic goblin feet to furry disembodied legs, Korean-Chinese artist Woo Jin Joo is using London junk to inject the art world with a spirit of playfulness

Woo Jin Joo’s studio is full of magic. Ceramic green goblin feet line the windowsill, disembodied furry legs jut out of one white wall and, on the table behind where the Korean-Chinese artist sits drinking tea, a headless being dressed in a black coat squats, arms aloft in warning.

There are also neat racks of colourful thread next to a freehand embroidery machine, the source of this supernatural hoard. This is where Joo creates much of her art – surface embroideries and sculptural 3D creatures inspired by Korean myth, philosophy and the relationship between humans and the natural world.

The last time she displayed a sculpture in public in Britain, someone covered it in white paint. But, undeterred, the acclaimed artist is a placing a black woman in Trafalgar Square

Tschabalala Self is relentlessly positive and unstoppably optimistic. The US artist is waiting for the unveiling of Lady in Blue, her new sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, a towering, colourful painted bronze of a black woman striding (positively, optimistically) into the future. Self seems resolutely hopeful about the work, which is pretty impressive considering what happened to her last public sculpture in the UK. “Yeah,” she says, speaking from her home in upstate New York. “I mean, that was a completely racist act.”

In 2022, Self unveiled Seated at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London. Like Lady in Blue, it was a vast, brightly painted bronze depiction of a black woman, this time seated demurely on a chair. After being shown at Coal Drops Yard without incident, it was moved to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where the reception wasn’t quite as warm. “Within the first week,” says Self, “it was spraypainted white, but only on the skin of the sculpture.” As vandalism goes, it doesn’t get much more pointed, or racist. “The first feeling I had was just pain that my sculpture had been harmed. That someone had enacted violence on an object I had imbued with love and affection.”