Seo Junghee’s Story on ‘Time Traveller’

Jung Kumhee The Professor of Chonnam National University is shown as footprint of our life and the woman sits for a moment and reflects on her life. The materials under the reality beyond the window makes traveller’s foot stop for a while and creates a sad atmosphere.

However, the bicycle will not stop and again take her somewhere. Despite unknown or unidentified travel, she never stops travelling. It is her life.

To describe differently, Seo Junghee’s series ‘Time Traveller’ is a picture that contains ‘travelling self-portrait.’ Containing her own autobiographical contents, she is staring at the joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure that she had felt while living like an observer and enjoying travel. After the unknown travel going somewhere from the repetitive everyday life and taking a rest leisurely from the Mother Nature, she returns to her ordinary routine. The beginning and the end are quite different although they seem equal at a glance. At the bitter end of realization is ‘just being.’

To where will her work opening a new realm toward watercolor painting reach? Like introduction, development, turn, and conclusion in a narrative structure or height

of harvest, her works will bring to fruition at one point. It is worth tracing it.

An artist’s desire to go beyond the category of painting always smoulders within the planar canvas. An artist’s race for caging in the uncontrollable desire is an excited delight accompanied with a pain.

Seo Junghee’s ‘Time Traveler’ series is a programme music. Furthermore, it contains the most attractive concept crossing the domains of science and imagination, fair and square without using a metaphor, by borrowing the power of title. It does not forget the consistency of series. 

It requires a deep breath as if reading a full-length novel with mythical narrativity contained. At the same time, lyric emotion plays a variation in a melody and endless storytelling is reminiscent of Decameronic technique.

The artist’s pure desire transcends any genres like this and reveals a fusion of literature, arts, and science in front of our eyes. Is this an excessive desire? Is this precarious like a wing with wax dripping from a candle? At the point of time when a doubt sprouts, watercolors stop momentarily in a calm way as if reaching a freezing point. All desires flying away are confined within the neatness of watercolors. 

Using various materials from oil painting, acrylics, to paints, Seo Junghee was attracted by watercolor painting after a “significant period of time” and immersed herself into it, revealing “I am still floating.” She might have fallen deep into the mystical ability of water that even confines the hotness at the cooling point frozen clearly. Her pictures drawn with Arches and watercolors create a fantastic atmosphere with transparent and composed touch and delicate and rich colors. 

Seo Junghee’s pictures generally create a peaceful and happy atmosphere and the expressive technique reproducing objects look innocent with the innocence shown

in children’s painting added. Her series takes a mystical, dreamlike, and surrealistic tendency with realistic techniques and simplified shapes in harmony with background. The main character who leads the story in her work is a woman. 

While a guitar is being played, she falls into a meditation or is contemplating. And then she leads her bicycle and stops under the crescent moon with clouds passing by and quietly listens to the tunes of fragrant flowers. Flower blossoms as lily, hydrangea, rose, and phrygia along the trails of a traveller. The details of flower is her worship for beauty. Interestingly, her Time Traveller does not rely in the speed that is out of the lightspeed. Rather, it controls time through slowness. The bicycle whose

spoke moves and slowly runs like the rotation of the universe is a vehicle to guide a traveller’s time.

To Seo Junghee, cloud and rain are special materials. She is heard to prefer calm and quiet days with sounds and smells of dropping rain to sunny days. Also, she is

familiar with crescent moon rather than a round and glittering full moon. It is like something precious kept in a jewel box, but is feeble and sad on the other hand.

The crescent moon coming up from the darkness a moment ago but not yet soared up seems to replace the sad stories that were made while living. 

In Seo Junghee’s paintings, another unique material is a soft and thin thread.

This is adhesively connected with humans or things. Thread plays a role like a bridge and thus becomes a loop between the past and the present, real and surreal,

and time and space. Coincidence or inevitability is also connection. Preciousness, pleasure, and sadness accompanied with meeting and departing become particles,

which are connected like a series of beads and become the thread of connection.

Fine lines are used mostly. To reveal the fine materials, background is treated with reserved grey colors and the woman who reveals her large head laterally is lost in

flower scents and memories like Alice in WonderLand. The changes in green color seem to give tranquility and stability and the red lip treated in front looks more vivid

with three-dimensionality highlighted.

The women on the screen with the strength of green stalks supporting yellow Phrygia emphasized is red-faced and the woman who wears yellow clothes under the guitar mint-colored under the table and the arabesque patterns spread in soft curves is staring at the surreal world.

Phrygia means innocence or virginity. Sweet spring implies birth and hope and so Time Traveller is expected to welcome the happiest moment soon.

In another work, a vase with roses in it is placed in the center and naturally connected with the road spread mystically in the form of crescent moon. The road