Kumho Museum

2026 금호영아티스트 1부

2026 KUMHO YOUNG ARTIST Part.1

2026. 3. 6 – 4. 12
 

3F 서원미 《대극장 𝘎𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳​》

Wonmi Seo engages personal narratives and historical events through paintings that move between abstraction and figuration. Her practice centers on the confrontation with fundamental emotions such as death, anxiety, and trauma, unfolding a painterly trajectory that begins with personal experience, extends into social and historical realms, and ultimately turns inward. Over the years, Seo has developed her practice by translating onto the canvas scenes held at a measured distance from herself, landscapes that are at once familiar and estranged. Beginning with family narratives, she gradually extended her focus to encompass social events, presenting the series Facing (2012–2016) and The Black Curtain (2016–2019), where unresolved questions are explored with sustained intensity. While these works accumulate emotion and narrative within relatively classical representational forms, Carnival Head (2021) marks a turning point toward a dismantling of form and the emergence of surfaces that lay bare the artist's intimate struggle.
 

In Grand Theater, Seo presents works that follow this turning point and mark a renewed inward orientation. Drawing on landscapes encountered in the everyday rhythms between home and studio, she articulates a sense of temporality in which past, present, and future converge. Alongside this, she develops a cyclical understanding of the relationship between nature and human life, rendering these sensibilities as painterly scenes. Prioritizing how to sense rather than what to depict, she reconstructs on the canvas modes of perception most closely attuned to lived experience in the present. The exhibition is structured around two stages, day and night. The outer gallery functions as a daytime stage shaped by linear time, where narratives of the external world accumulate densely, producing an impression of spatial intensity. The inner gallery, in contrast, emerges as a nighttime stage within cyclical time, offering a more open and loosely configured space shaped by expanded private sensibility. While the daytime stage foregrounds layers of external events that have long shaped the artist's practice, the nighttime stage unfolds as a psychological landscape oriented inward. Together, these two stages form the dual aspects of a single day, structuring a site of intersection between the external and internal worlds and signaling a shift in the artist's orientation from an emphasis on events to a focus on sensation. The tension generated by the intertwining of linear and cyclical time, and of external narrative and inner sensibility, invites reflection on how accumulated narratives gradually permeate the realm of sensation.