WildFlower Collage 25

Artist Statement

Observation and Affinity: 2023, Wildflower Collage – Kim Seo-Woo I grew up in a remote countryside as a child, on close terms with nature, and had plenty of experience working in the fields. Planting chili seedlings or beans was, for the most part, one daily piece of my early life. One day, I noticed wildflowers I had never planted growing around the edge of the field, their names unknown to me. Those wildflowers came to me differently from common weeds, and looking up the unknown wildflowers in the plant encyclopedia in my father's study became a delight. These memories and experiences were forgotten for a while, and only resurfaced naturally as a subject of my work after I came as an adult to study in Seoul (the city). For that reason, for the past several years I have been making landscape paintings about scenes of nature that have remained in my heart. The new series I began last year departs from those childhood experiences in the fields. I gather wildflowers that go unnoticed by those around me, and complete a painting through collage. As if writing a daily diary, I gather the wildflowers and flowers blooming near home — mugwort, sow thistle, goosefoot, and many other grasses and flowers — and paint them onto small pieces of canvas, then connect those fragments in a collage to make a single painting. The countless wildflowers and flowers painted on tiny canvas pieces appear at times as a cluster (群集) and at times as individual blades of grass, each with its own character. This way of working is an obsessive observation of what is discarded or overlooked nearby; the way the canvases of different wildflowers come together as a single image through collage is not regular but holds a comforting and noisy duality born from chaos — a divided self of mine. Reading the British cultural scholar Raymond Williams's The Country and the City, one finds a common pattern of human behavior across these two opposed environments: the country dweller longs for the city, and the city dweller longs for the country. He calls this a structure of feeling of retrospection, a response to a particular social distortion. Put more simply: people who live in the city carry a vague fantasy of country life, of pastoral living, while people in the country carry a vague fantasy of the city's sophistication and social life. And this is one of our cultural phenomena. Williams says that a distortion of thought arises between the country and the city, each toward the other. I was born and raised in the country and came to study in the city. So an environment that cannot be overcome remains within me as a divided thing, and I fill the gap with vague curiosity and fantasy. Thus the wildflowers, ignored by the city, are fragments of myself; my painting, in which I gather wildflowers and harmonize them in collage, is an image of myself — divided between the urban and the pastoral environments, yet bound together by a single trunk of thought.