Jinnie Seo’s on-site installation Red Clouds is inspired by the works and the brief life
of the 16th-century pioneer female poet and scholar, Huh Nansulhun, who accomplished
an unprecedented, extraordinary literary feat against all odds in her life, confined within the social
restrictions of the times. Words of sorrow, loneliness, and despair are sublimated into a deep
understanding of life and the world, as well as colorful, vibrant fantasies born from her outstanding
creativity and extensive knowledge of ancient Chinese and Taoist literature. Not an unfulfilled dream,
but a hopeful vision living and breathing in her poems.
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In Jinnie Seo’s work, one becomes a part of the landscape, like a figure that wanders around
in the scenery unfolding in a traditional Eastern landscape painting. Red Clouds takes the
viewers on a journey into the imaginary landscape of rocks and mountains leading towards the
unknown place – a transient and yet intimate space where every woman’s yearning and
aspirations are freed from the confinements of life, from ancient to contemporary,
traversing from the east to the west. Timeless and borderless, it is a place of her own.
In the light coming through the glass walls, the physicality of materials
– the luminous Korean traditional handmade paper forming a curvilinear flow of mountains,
the translucent straw pieces intricately interwoven by hand into a cloud – attains an intangible
warmth and glow permeating the air. Ever-changing in shape and color, resilient yet also
tenacious, it is the embodiment of a female sensitivity and sensibility that reflect and embrace
the fleeting moments and fragments of life, the body and the mind where new dreams
are conceived and born.
Yoewool Kang
2014 |
