A garden is a way
of knowing the world
Through gardens and plants she traces the self and the order of the world.The grain of a leaf meets the grain of the woodblock.
A garden, layered —
plants as a way of seeing
Go Jayeong is a mid-career printmaker whose practice is rooted in the woodblock and the print. Taking the garden and the plant as her recurring subjects, she uses them to feel her way toward the self and the order of the world. Her images are quiet and contemplative, attentive to the small grammar of growing things.
She completed a doctorate at the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University; her 2001 dissertation, “A Study on the Expression of Layered Visual Experience Using Plants as Subject Matter,” already names the concern that runs through her work — the layered visual experience of looking at a plant, where surface and depth, image and ground, fold into one another.
In 2007 she was selected as the 1st SEO Young Artist, and her work entered an active decade of solo and group exhibitions. The plant, in her hands, is never mere decoration: it is a figure for the self that grows, branches, and bears its season — a way of reading the world through the patient logic of a garden.
The material of the print matters as much as the motif. The grain of the woodblock, the pressure of the press, the registered layers of an edition — these physical facts of printmaking become, in her work, a second botany. The grain of a leaf and the grain of the block belong to the same family of marks.
Major themes
- 1
Gardens and plants
The garden and the plant as recurring subjects — figures through which she explores the self and the order of the world.
- 2
Layered visual experience
The concern named in her 2001 doctoral dissertation — surface and depth folding into one another as the eye reads a plant.
- 3
The matter of the print
The grain of the woodblock and the layered logic of the edition become a second botany — the grain of leaf and block meeting.
The artist's timeline
- 2000Special Prize, Korea Contemporary Printmakers Association open call.
- 2001Ph.D. dissertation: "A Study on the Expression of Layered Visual Experience Using Plants as Subject Matter"; Excellence Prize, Korea Contemporary Printmakers Association open call.
- 2004Solo exhibitions at Gallery Artlink and Sejong Gallery.
- 2006Selected Works, Space International Print Biennale.
- 2007Selected as the 1st SEO Young Artist; solo exhibition at SEO Gallery.
- 2008Selected Artist, 30th JoongAng Fine Arts Prize; solo exhibition at Dr. Park Gallery.
- 2009Selected Artist, SongEun Art Award (SongEun Art Award Exhibition, Insa Art Center).
- 2010Solo exhibition at Gallery Artlink.
Selected exhibitions & collections
- Group exhibition: 《Korean Contemporary Prints 1958–2008》, MMCA Gwacheon (2008)
- New Acquisitions exhibition, Seoul Museum of Art (2008); Seoul Art Exhibition — Prints, Seoul Museum of Art (2007)
- Incheon International Women Artists Biennale (2007); Spectrum of the Korean Contemporary Print, Russia (2007)
- Collections: MMCA Art Bank (Gwacheon), Seoul Museum of Art, Samsung Medical Center Cancer Center, Industrial Bank of Korea
- Collections: Seoul Central District Court, Namseoul University, SEO Gallery
Three essays —
on the garden and the grain
1The garden as subject — self and the order of the world
For Go Jayeong, the garden is not a backdrop but a method. A garden is a place where wild growth and human care meet — where things are allowed to grow, but along lines someone has chosen. To take the garden as a subject is to ask how the self and the world arrange themselves: what is cultivated, what is left to its own season, what returns each year.
The plants she draws are read this way — not as still life but as figures of a self that grows. A stem that branches, a leaf that unfolds, a root held in the dark: each is a small grammar of becoming. Through them she feels her way toward the order of the world, the slow logic by which living things take their shape.
2Layered visual experience — the 2001 dissertation
Her 2001 doctoral dissertation at Seoul National University, A Study on the Expression of Layered Visual Experience Using Plants as Subject Matter, gives her practice its vocabulary. To look at a plant is never to look at one thing: there is the surface and the depth behind it, the part lit and the part in shadow, the image and the ground that holds it. The eye moves through these as through layers.
Printmaking is uniquely suited to this. An edition is built in passes; each layer of ink rests on the one before, and the final image carries the memory of every press. In her work the layered seeing of a plant and the layered making of a print become the same operation — a way of giving depth its own visible structure.
3The grain of the block — print as a second botany
A woodblock has a grain before any image is cut into it. The carver works with and against that grain; the wood resists, gives, and leaves its own mark in the print. In Go Jayeong's hands this is not an accident to be smoothed away but a kinship to be kept — the grain of the block and the grain of the leaf are the same kind of line.
This is why her plants feel grown rather than drawn. The physical facts of printmaking — pressure, registration, the layered edition — become a second botany, a way of making images that obey the patience of living things. The result is a body of work that is quiet, contemplative, and rooted: a garden kept in ink and wood.
Go Jayeong joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that those who tend their own gardens of work might do so without the weight of financial exclusion.
From the garden to the woodblock, Go Jayeong's work pursues a single question: how does a living thing take its shape, and how can a print hold that becoming? The answer, built over two decades of plants and prints, is a quiet botany of the self — and she offers it here in solidarity, so that fellow artists might keep growing.
Selected Works
1 works are featured here.
Go Jayeong joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
