Anna Jung Seo
O love, how did you get here?
Project Native Informant, London
Dappled brushwork, delicate hues, and cloisonne-like textures dance across the surfaces of Anna Jung Seo's portraits, still lives and landscapes. The London-based Korean painter is first and foremost a painter of life, both real and imagined. Seo primarily approaches her subjects in one of two ways: painting from observation or from literary sources. Life and its mysteries are abiding questions. Her compositions are always non-photographic, but based on the imprint of memory, and principally, on the act of painting itself. By stressing substance over verisimilitude, Seo allows multiple narratives to inhabit her work simultaneously. Colour and shape fold into environment, dancing amid the density of freely applied oil paint. The resulting paintings often have a sense of sensual wildness, as if Seo is wrestling with the messiness of life.
Each painting is a riddle. Through the process of painting, Seo poses an intimate query and posits a possible answer. In her second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, titled O love, how did you get here?, Seo revisits the same image through a number of paintings made over an extended period of time, asking if time itself changes perspective. In the series Your Nakedness, the artist came across some trees with oddly shaped humps and knots while walking in London; she was intrigued by their shape and how, over time, memory transforms what she actually saw. Certain curves or undulations are emphasised, while the texture and tone of the undulating branches shift as the memory recedes in time.
