The portrait
of a tree

Ha Seonyeong's path runs through two disciplines. She trained first as a painter, majoring in painting at Hongik University, before crossing to France to study photography at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie d'Arles — a school given over entirely to the photographic image, set in the southern French city long associated with light and with the history of looking.

That move from brush to lens is easy to read as a change of medium, but it is better read as a continuity of attention. Painting teaches a slow way of seeing: the eye lingers, the hand returns, the subject is built up over time. Ha carried this patience into photography. Where the camera can take a scene in an instant, she uses it the way a painter uses a long sitting — to wait on the subject until its character declares itself.

The result is a photographic practice that does not feel hurried. The frame is composed rather than caught; the tonality is considered; the subject is given the time a painter would give it. In Ha's hands the two media are not rivals but a single, extended education in how to look.

To photograph a tree is common; to call the result a portrait is not. Portraiture implies a subject that looks back — a presence with interiority, with a face to be read. By placing the tree in that genre, Ha Seonyeong makes a quiet claim: that a tree is not background but being, deserving of the same attention one would give a person.

This changes how the picture is made. A landscape photographer might frame a tree as part of a wider scene; Ha isolates it, attends to its particularity — the lean of the trunk, the spread and weight of the canopy, the way its form carries the years it has stood. Each tree becomes a likeness of itself, distinct from every other, the way no two faces are the same.

There is a tenderness in this gesture. To grant a face to a tree is to refuse the habit of treating the natural world as mere setting for human life. The portrait of a tree asks the viewer to meet it as one meets another presence — slowly, attentively, with the recognition that it, too, has a bearing of its own.

In the pandemic years, Ha Seonyeong's work found a second purpose alongside its first. For people worn down by that difficult time — the closed rooms, the long uncertainty — she turned to the natural beauty of the world as a source of consolation, making images meant less to impress than to soothe.

This is a particular use of beauty. It does not aim at spectacle. It aims at rest — the small relief of being reminded that, beyond the walls of a hard season, the world still holds light through leaves, the steadiness of a tree, a quiet one can return to. The work offers itself as a place to set down, for a moment, the weight of a difficult time.

It is here that her practice meets the spirit of this campaign. An artist who spent the hardest season making consolation for others joins SAF not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that the proceeds of her work might become a low-interest lifeline for Korean artists facing financial exclusion today. The gesture is continuous with the work: attention turned outward, comfort passed on.