Ranging from drawings and paintings to structures made out of metal, plastic, or copper, Jinnie Seo's monumental and meticulously arranged installations combine two- and three-dimensional approaches. Seo often prompts the viewer to navigate through her work, generating room for both physical and emotional explorations of time, space, and memories.
Read MoreJinnie Seo often references natural phenomena in her installations. End of the Rainbow, which was installed at Seoul's Mongin Art Center in 2009, consisted of achromatic steel bands and netting that cascaded throughout the space. Rivers, exhibited in the group show Spectrum Spectrum at Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, in 2014, imitated the flow of water with an unlikely material: leather bands that came down from the ceiling and wrapped around a pair of columns. In Wandering Still, created for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (Seoul), in 2015, Seo wove straws together to create a translucent ceiling structure that evoked clouds, and placed rolled pieces of Korean rice paper on the floor, referencing the Korean landscape painting tradition.
Many of Jinnie Seo's public projects contemplate time and memory. Wings of Vision, located at Incheon Airport's Terminal 2 since 2018, is a mural depicting stylised clouds that slowly shift from blue to yellow, alluding to the passage of time between sunrise and sunset. Another mural, Rays of Hope (2019), at Stanford Hospital's interfaith chapel in California, was painted with the idea that a moment of stillness can be life-changing. With flowing forms that evoke golden butterflies against a metallic dark blue background, the mural illustrates how both art and nature can offer a moment of pause and restore an ailing spirit.
In her solo exhibition Her Sides of Us at Gallery Baton, Seoul, in 2020, Jinnie Seo explored the relationship between the physical body and the exhibition space in Copper Open Cube Sculptures. The cube structures, made out of thin copper tubing, were suspended from the ceiling and created a makeshift pathway through which the viewer could enter the exhibition. With its monumental scale and geometric approach, the work reflects the legacy of Minimalism.
With a background in biology, Jinnie Seo studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine before receiving an MFA from New York University in 1992.
A Piece of Sky, Hapjungjigu, Seoul (2017); Wandering Still—Cascade, Gallery Factory, Seoul (2016); Red Clouds, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam (2014); Edge of Blue, Corner Art Space, Seoul (2013); Soundscape, Horim Art Center, Seoul (2010).
B-cut Drawing, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul (2017); Making is Thinking is Making, Triennale di Milano, Milan (2016); Interplay, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2015); Spectrum Spectrum, PLATEAU, Seoul (2014); The Show Must Go On, Praxis Space, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts (2013).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020
