At first sight Silent Voice looks like a black torso, and also a rib cage where tiny strands of hair grow from each bone. Meanwhile Heard is a long seashell that resembles the inner human ear, and Breath to Breath a cocoon pregnant with change. But one is almost sure that it will not metamorphose into a butterfly, but into a seedling instead. These mutating natural forms depicted by Seola Kim (b. 1983, Yeosu/Gwangju) straddle between the organic and the surreal, as hybrids of animals and plants. Upon taking a closer look one realizes too that although they may look like drawings, the works are in fact acrylic on paper, each brush stroke patiently, meditatively applied by the artist. An embodiment of mental strength, technique, and precision.
Are the images in Seola’s work creatures from another place and time? Or are they forms that mutated because of our footprints as a species, a society? Or have these forms become perceivable to us because our own subjectivities have shifted, even transformed, such that we have become aware of things that were previously invisible?
Seola’s practice has been informed by her upbringing in Korea, memories of bearing witness to the urban development of her own hometown, and losing her childhood home to fire. It is also shaped by her experiences of studying and living in India for seven years, first as a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, one of the important art schools founded in post-colonial India, and then as an artist in Baroda. Through her conversations and experiences with people and places of histories and ancestries other than her own, she navigates her own sojourns of discoveries. Seola returned to Korea in 2014 but her conversations with histories and the self continue. MW
self-presentation:
Memories for an artist feed the poignancy of their imagery. I recall observing my hometown getting slowly demolished over time. I was raised to read poetry with ease and comfort, and so as a painter the poetic image is what I use to evoke human experiences. Filtered from varied sources, transposed meanings make up the poetics of my language. Whether from Japanese haiku, which conveys a closer observation of the substance of materials in everyday life, or the film The Color of Pomegranates (1969) by Sergei Parajanov, which suggests a visual tactility to awaken the consciousness of latent interpretations, or Kafka’s words, which embrace enquiries of vulnerability… All this and more are where I find my threads of empathy to the world; and my teachers Rekha Rodwittiya and Surendran Nair have taught me to look at reality through experiential and communicative devises that comprehend the subtle nuances that contextualize my space of belonging.
