J Seo

“Nothing is fixed. Everything is disappearing. Present is the only thing we have.”

J Seo’s paintings are based on a particular mood and story: the sensation of being in a present moment while also acknowledging that in the future you will miss that time and place; a preemptive form of nostalgia for a time that is presently occurring. Born in South Korea, but now living and working in London and Seoul, much of J Seo’s work endeavours to encapsulate moments and memories as a kind of meditation on her home and the landscapes of her childhood. J Seo expresses this using the tone and materiality of her work. Subtle colour and incredibly thin Hanji paper are used to convey sentiments of ephemerality, fragility and transience, to try and capture a ‘disappearing moment’ and give form to the essence of fading away.

J Seo’s Untitled is taken from a series of works which depict the lakes and mountainous landscapes of rural South Korea, the landscape she grew up in. This region surrounding her was one of the main elements influencing her creativity and thought process. Sensing a gap between who she was and where she was, J Seo took to artistic practises to seek a resolution to the her dichotomy of feeling like a stranger in her conservative hometown because of her political identity, and a stranger in the cities she occupies today, due to her nationality. Viewing her work as a space to look at oneself with consolation, J Seo sees this lake series as illustrating ‘a home for a homeless’; a record or creative documentation which could comfort feelings of isolation and sorrow. The thin, delicate Hanji paper, a symbol of fragility, is permeated with soft, watery colour, which has stained the paper’s grains and spread in a way which emphasises the work’s focus on temporal ephemerality.