At first sight, it’s a swathe of colours that greets visitors at Kalakriti art gallery. South Korean artist, educator and colour therapist Jeong Ja Seo has a way with colours and hopes that visitors will take a closer look at her abstracts and let it all sink in.
Seo has been painting for 30 years, since the time she turned 20, and states that she still feels she has only begun to skim the surface of art. Seo’s body of work leans towards the abstract and she is hugely inspired by philosophical art history.
This is her eleventh exhibition of her series ‘Healing’ in which she uses several deep hues to arrive at different compositions that give her work a ‘meditative’ quality. Prior to Hyderabad, she displayed the series in Vijayawada in an exhibition hosted by Cultural Centre of Vijayawada.
Seo has visited Vijayawada, Amaravathi and Hyderabad and her impressions of these cities find a way into the ‘Healing’ series. For instance, she titles a 72.1X60.6cm acrylic on canvas work with a judicious mix of green, turmeric yellow and vermilion red, ‘1:30am at Hyderabad airport’. The abstraction could be lost on an untrained eye, but that’s the way the artist records her first impression of landing in Hyderabad.
The artist’s impression of cities extends beyond the visual imagery. There are three bottles of fragrances labelled Hyderabad, Vijayawada and Seoul. The fragrance that constitutes Seoul is milder and it gets stronger, with prominent notes of musk, as one moves to Vijayawada.
Healing through art, states Seo, refers to the cleansing of the body and soul. She draws from principles of therapeutic functions of art and refers to observations of Friedrich Nietxache of art being a necessary means to escape the fundamental pain of life. Seo also draws from Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis of looking at art as a method for people to relieve their pain. The paintings in ‘Healing’ series have large planes of colour that lend themselves to a different tones and textures in a square frame. Seo states that she looked at the canvas as a two-dimensional form that could be integrated into one with paint. She calls the series as her attempt at pursuing pure and positive visual expression.
(Healing by Jeong Ja Seo is on view at Kalakriti, Banjara Hills, till October 9.)