art'otel cologne, by Park Plaza

In 2001, she came to Berlin. She studied at the University of the Arts with Georg Baselitz who was a major influence on her work, but encouraged her to return to her roots. Since 2003, SEO has been painting in a unique way, using a material wholly familiar from everyday life in Korea: hand-made Hanji rice paper. It is torn into strips and affixed to primed canvas using special glue, which restorers also use, and painted with acrylic paint. The coloured paper strips, in no less than five layers, form the motifs of her large-scale pictures.

Because of her close relation to paintings of the Romantic Movement, such as those of Caspar David Friedrich, and her many landscapes, SEO is often called a neo-romantic. Her roots in art history are broader and more complex; however, in her pictures, elements of French nineteenth-century painting, German Romanticism, Austrian Art Nouveau and American and European Modernism are mixed with traditional eastern subjects. SEO's passionate identification with nature and opposition to environmental destruction and climate change culminate in paradisiacal scenes which no longer exist or perhaps never existed in this form.