WildFlower Collage 26

Observation and Affinity: Wildflower Collage, 2023 — Kim Seo-woo
I grew up in a remote rural village, close to nature, and had plenty of experience working in the fields. Planting chili pepper seedlings or beans was simply a part of my childhood routine. One day, I noticed unfamiliar wildflowers I had never planted growing around the field. These wildflowers came to me differently from mere weeds, and looking them up in the plant encyclopedias on my father's bookshelf became one of my joys.
These memories and experiences faded for a while, but as an adult moving to Seoul (the city) for school, they naturally became the subject of my work. For the past several years I have painted landscapes drawn from the natural scenery still living within me.
The new series I began last year departs from those childhood field experiences. I gather wildflowers that go unnoticed by those around me and complete paintings through collage. As if writing a daily diary, I collect the wildflowers and blossoms growing near my home — mugwort, sowthistle, lamb's quarters, and others — paint them onto small fragments of canvas, and then assemble those fragments into a single painting in collage form. Painted on countless small pieces of canvas cloth, the wildflowers and blossoms appear as a colony, while each tuft of grass also reveals its own individuality. This way of working is an obsessive attention paid to the discarded and overlooked around me; the irregular way that canvases of different wildflowers come together as a single image embodies my fractured self, where the comfort and the noise of chaos exist side by side.
When I read the British cultural critic Raymond Williams' book The Country and the City, I encountered a recurring human pattern across these two opposite environments: country dwellers long for the city, and city dwellers long for the country. Williams describes this as a structure of feeling rooted in nostalgia, a response to particular social distortions. Put simply, urbanites carry vague fantasies of bucolic country life, while country dwellers carry vague fantasies of urban sophistication and social life — and this is itself a cultural phenomenon. Williams writes that country and city each distort one another in thought. I was born and raised in the countryside and came to the city for school. Within me lies an unbridgeable rift between these two environments, and I keep filling its gap with vague curiosity and fantasy.
Thus the wildflowers ignored by the city are pieces of myself, and my paintings — gathering wildflowers and harmonizing them in collage form — are images of myself, fractured between the urban environment and the pastoral one yet bound together by a single thread of contemplation.