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Seungkyung Oh

Artist Statement


 

My work is aimed at sharing the real places I have travelled to with my viewers along with the mental environments I create to protect myself from socio-environmental stressors. When opportunity arises, I travel to actual locations, but this is not always feasible and constructs worlds I yearn to see in my head. These places only exist mentally, and do not exist in reality.

 

I create paintings, sculptures, monotype and silkscreen prints, and make handmade books. The material I use and medium I decide depends on how I want the viewer to experience the work I create. I use colors that are evocative of a dream like realm or a subconscious invocation. I am inspired by nature, such as green grasses, tropical forests and the darkest time of night; moonless only containing the light emitted from the stars. This creates symbolic invocations relating to a sense of mystery, enigma and liberation. In my works, I deliberately idealize reality, using the expressiveness of sensual aesthetics, the rhythm of bright color spots, lines, silhouettes create a sensation of extraterrestrial and mystical, extra social space to convey exceptional brightness, powerful flowery, special expressiveness and attractiveness.

 

My artworks fulfill its duties of practicing freedom and independence. My figures are transforming into a plant that liberates itself from the confinement and violence of the world, and after every word and thoughts from that world has dissipated. I create the world traveled to in my imagination and recognizes it as reality. I feel it becomes my reality and wish the viewer travels into my imaginary world.

 

I feel reality contains those aspects of discourse which I personally want to escape in order to reach that place that could be illusionary, void of the harshness of a reality I or someone else might endure. Depicting the contrasting aspects of these themes is the purpose of my current study of the human existence. To attain utopia, to me it is gained through the sufferings of an existence on the physical realms of reality.  

The physical realm is one of physical feelings, one of the reception of personal harm from the social existence. In order to find peace, one has to give up the pain for a meditative state that causes one to reach a level of existence higher than the plane of the physical.  

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