SeJung; passion and ingenuity
One day, Sejung was drawing a bottle of wine while her mother and her aunt were having conversation. She didn’t intent to draw beautifully, it was more like a doodle. However, her aunt—who had a lot of fascinating and knowledge of art—found Sejung’s aptitude for art. Notwithstanding effortless doodle, her aunt was very interested her drawing and proposed to her studying abroad. It was a trigger of Sejung’s new life. After the day, she started to go art studio to learn about art and prepare to enroll in art school in United States.
Nevertheless, that was an unexpected change, because she had never thought about studying art, that was not abnormal for her. This is why she had influenced her family members who were involved art industry. Her family had many connections with artist, especially, her aunt had art gallery in Seoul. There were a multitude of galleries in Sejung’s neighborhood. Therefore, she had frequently gone gallery and museum since she was a little girl, even she had gone art elementary school. She was able to accept this big change when she transfers to high school, after that she spend almost her time in art studio except she was in her school.
She had been preparing her portfolio for art university for three years. Although she enjoyed this period time, it must have been hard time to her. She had a talent in drawing and painting when she had been going to art elementary school; however, everything was new for her. It was certainly different between studying art in elementary school and high school. However, she had great quality of art pieces in her works in that time. Many of pieces are elaborate design and skill. One of them was taken quite long time which was linear perspective view of New York City. Ii was taken more than one week only for making rough sketch. Moreover, its assorted color necessitated prudent brush stroke, because if she had touched with wrong color, it would have re-painted bigger part than the part of the mistake and it was hard to make same color of it. Moreover, each time she had to use masking tape for exact and neat lines. She also tried to fuse masterpieces in the past and common things in now days in her painting. She reproduced Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere with very commercial stuffs such as McDonald hamber and Coca Cola. This was fusion of different time, and also recalls to criticism of modern era in sarcastic way. She also expressed zoology in her art works as Parsons challenge. She put people into cages and put animals out of the cages to observe the people. This mordant criticism had people reconsider of arrogance of people. Her works were thriving based on her creative process of trial. One piece was made of real chicken bones for reality. The chicken was eaten very clearly by herself. Having new idea is essential for artist and she has this ability. While she was attempting to attain something new, she gradually became to be interested in advertisement, posters, typography, and creating music album cover based on her inventiveness. She decided to study graphic design as her major, and now her major is communication design at Parsons.
Even though she has relatives—who are Sejung’s sister, her husband and her daughter—in New York City, at the beginning of time in new atmosphere was not easy. Since everything was unacquainted and strange. Unfortunately, she expected to meet her sister but she could not due to her sister’s dog was sick so her sister had to be in hospital for two days. Sejung had to stay with her brother-in-law and this situation must have been awkward. She tried to register regarding to her international student visa, but she was an ignorant girl from Korea. She had to take a picture for her student ID without and preparation even her face was wet with sweat. Who know that it is permanent picture for her school ID? Only one advantage of the unprepared photo of ID makes her friends laugh. As most of international students struggle in new environment, she also has dealt with various situation; however, she did not give up and accomplished ESL classes with good grade and started her new semester on September at Parsons with scholarship!
In many time she is inspired by Jean-Michelle Basquiat. She loves his doodle style of painting, his originality, and his ideas. One day, we can see her beautiful art pieces somewhere in advertisement and attracted by her creativity.
I made a portrait of Sejung and me, which was inspired by our conversation at the studio class.
