Wonju Seo
Kang Collection, Collection Korean Art, NYC
In Colors In My Surroundings No. 1, Wonju Seo uses as leitmotif the instantly recognizable, brightly colored striped sleeve of the traditional Korean women’s jeogori, embedding variations of the five-colored pattern into a larger scheme of warm pinks and browns inspired by the colors of the Korean dresses worn by her mother.
Recalls Seo, “As a young girl I was entranced by my mother’s Korean dresses. They were so neatly folded in her closet, and retained her fragrance. So for this artwork I chose the same colors of my mother’s dresses for the larger areas of fabric.”
Seo’s delicate colors and orderly, slender slips of fabric form a graceful, elegant composition that evokes feminine beauty. Framed within the traditional bojagi border, the artwork brings together the dual identities of being Korean and being woman into a harmonious whole. Painstakingly hand-stitched and composed, Colors In My Surroundings No. 1 took over 240 hours to create.
The World Outside My Window evokes fragmented images and sensations as filtered and abstracted through a window of distance and time. Surveying this landscape of color and pure geometry constructed from the artist’s past, the viewer is able to see through her eyes. Yet the artist is visible as well—one glimpses through the ordered, elegant forms an inner realm fraught with expressivity.
In describing The World Outside My Window. Seo recalls, “I remember looking through windows as a child, dreaming of the world outside, wondering about all the experiences awaiting me. I was curious. I yearned for knowledge about other people and places. I allowed these memories to guide my creative process.”
Created in a completely intuitive process, without pre-existing pattern or plan, the artist combined found colored silk and ramie with her own hand-dyed silk.