Riverside Gallery presents Seo, Mira: Along the Way, curated by Soojung Hyun.

Date: August 6th– August 15th, 2018

Opening reception: Wednesday, August 8th 5: 00 – 7:00 pm

Mira Seo’s solo exhibition, Along the Way, presents select works from her early to recent career. The work of Seo is based on quests of self-reflection, including the subjects she chooses to paint and what she wants to convey through her paintings. Her journey as a painter has been visualized through her unique view of nature. As a Korean painter, her approach to nature is not merely a description of realist form, but the content in nature she has chosen to investigate. This includes the flow of energy, the emotional perspective and the psychological empathy connected to what she feels. Seo has said that her paintings are based on memories of actual landscapes that have been absorbed through her consciousness. The presence of the artist in her work offers a kind of encounter in capturing specific moments with nature that are essential to the healing of herself.

What is based on her insightful deliberation of nature? The core of her work conveys meaningful aspects of human existence through natural images. Her work ultimately addresses the aim that the origin of existence is the spirit of life. Seo has pursued the subjects since she started her artistic career after she earned the MFA from Chonnam National University in the early 1990s. Upon graduation, her first step focused on the turning point of Minjung Art in Gwangju city as an art form that had faded from the resistance movement against non-democratic social reality. The central theme of this movement was translated by each artist’s individual attention and taste. The authenticity of art was not the pursuit of idealistic beauty but the close contact with the artist’s own life. She tried to find the humanity in her own experience with nature and the humble response of her neighbors' stories rather than referencing a massive discourse.

Whereas Seo has tried to reduce sensuous input in her paintings, she found that her temperance of emotions indirectly led to a liberation of these sensations. Invisible things became interconnected in her paintings through the reduction of her outward emotions. This is evident in paintings, such as A Shooting Star (2013) and later, in Spring near a Riverside (2018), where it conjures the presence of a solitary tree. Her expression of nature began to emerge as both subtle and refined. Her painting of a plum blossom, Mugeuk (2011), implies the dignity found in traditional East Asian brush painting. Mugeuk represents the process of this flower at the moment of its blooming. It further evokes the paradoxical moment when the flower blooms for eternity yet within the course of everyday life.

Mira Seo was born in Gwangju City, Korea and received her MFA from Cheonnam National University. She has maintained her practices as a painter.

She received the Grand Prize of the 13th Shinsegae Art Award in 2011 and received the 12th Oh Jiho Art Award in 2013. She was recently invited by “AHL foundation’s program: Art in the Workplace” in collaboration with the Bank of Hope in New York. She was selected for the Beijing Art Residency organized by the Gwangju Museum of Art. Seo exhibits her work regularly in Gwangju, Seoul, Beijing, and New York.

- Soojung Hyun Ph.D. (Independent curator)