Project Native Informant is delighted to present a solo exhibition of Anna Jung Seo (b. 1964) 18 January - 18 February 2023. The exhibition comprises paintings from 2018 to the present.

The London-based Korean painter creates transportive images sourced from her real life interactions on the city’s streets: people going about their work, faces navigating the crowd, and still lives of commodities for sale. A contemporary flâneur, Seo is an acute observer of everyday life.

My paintings developed out of an interest in the intimate moments of people, which unveil the different layers of human relationships. I am fascinated by the way in which emotions and vulnerability of life can be dramatised into intimate or even awkward moments. I try to convey the vulnerability of people by capturing intense moments within a small-scale. I believe that these small moments are, though ephemeral, strong enough to show the fragmented truth of life. — Anna Jung Seo

Dappled brushwork, delicate hues, and cloisonne-like textures dance across the surfaces of the artist’s portraits, still lives, and landscapes. Seo applies strokes of varying opacity to indicate the swells of fabric or topiary in motion and in flux. With gold or shagreen hues ambiguously presenting either dawn or dusk, the artist draws attention to the passage of time, binding the ephemeral and the affective. In “Flying Riders” and “Wild Duck 2”, both 2022, the seemingly same desolate tree trunk is rendered twice in hues of color. Strokes of oil paint indicate a river bend around a mountain, thicket of near and far vegetation, their recessive quality echoed through the physicality of Seo’s process. On closer examination, two very different scenes appear, citing two very different texts by Bulgakv and Ibsen. Luminous and meditative, both paintings capture varying reflective moods.

Color acts as both an emotion and a compositional form in Seo’s process. The artist possesses a distinct vocabulary made up of brushy strokes, color washes, and shapes that transform across the picture plane, a technique which recalls Post-Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard and Eduard Vuillard, creating meticulous, psychologically-charged fields of color. In “Walpurgis Night”, 2018 -2022, figures at play  are rendered in sensual pinks and burgundies revealed in an abstract field of contemplative shades. The artist’s paintings evoke intense affect, from pleasure to terror and everything in-between.

Seo received her PhD in French literature from Yonsei University, Seoul (1999) and graduated in fine art programs from the Turps Studio Programme (2017) and the City & Guilds of London Art School (2011). This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London, after two solo exhibitions in Seoul in 2022.