Paintings Celebrate Cultural Hybrid

By Seo Dong-shin

Staff Reporter

When emerging artist Seo Soo-kyung, known these days as SEO across Europe and her home country South Korea, first arrived in Berlin in 2001, she was ready to experiment. The oriental-painting graduate from Chosun University in Gwangju wanted to use extravagant colors and rough brushstrokes, instead of the black-and-white ink painting consisting of delicate lines she had been schooled in.

But Georg Baselitz, a renowned German artist and teacher of SEO, saw it differently. ``Don't forget where you came from,'' said the master painter, making SEO do away with the oil colors from her desk in the first months. There began SEO's frustration, and she was unable to draw anything for the next half a year.

``But eventually things worked out,'' said the 30-year-old artist, laughing. ``Now my paintings are said to mix the East's lines and the West's colors. I think that if the colors were there (in Berlin) waiting for me, I brought the lines.''

Things more than worked out. These days, SEO's works are popular and command high prices on the European art market, and she has a waiting list of people wanting one of her works. Recognition has been catching on in her homeland as well. The relatively young artist is holding her first solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai in Sagan-dong, one of the most influential galleries in Seoul.

At ``SEO: Between Dreams,'' her recent paintings on display show the elements of what European critics call neo-romanticism, as romantic themes and expressionist style converge.

The themes of the paintings are often allegorical, as in the 2005 work ``Fight of the Shadow-Catchers,'' or indicative of her origin, as in her 2006 works depicting the scenes of traditional rice fields in Korea. The influence of the East is also felt in the way she works on her painting: she constructs a collage on canvas with strips of colorful traditional mulberry paper, which display their own colors or are painted upon.

A few landscape paintings from ``My German Dreams'' series, meanwhile, show influence of Caspar David Friedrich, a 19th century German romantic painter who excelled in his visionary landscape paintings. Like his, SEO's landscape paintings with human figures seen from behind, take on a meditative nature.

``I feel that contemporary society is out of balance in many ways. Society is obsessed with cutting-edge technology, and about making progress,'' she said. ``In a kind of counter reaction, I feel myself more and more thinking about nature, meditation and dreams, and my work follows these ideas.''