Project Native Informant is pleased to announce solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist Anna Jung Seo, opening on 6 June 2025 during London Gallery Weekend. 

                LGW hours:
                Friday 6 June 2025: 11:00 - 18:00
                Saturday 7 June 2025: 11:00 - 18:00
                Sunday 8 June 2025: 12:00 - 17:00


                Unit 1, Project Native Informant,
                48 Three Colts Lane, London E2 6GQ 

Dappled brushwork, delicate hues, and cloisonne-like textures dance across the surfaces of Anna Jung Seo's portraits, still lives and landscapes. The London-based Korean painter  is first and foremost a painter of life, both real and imagined. Seo primarily approaches her subjects in one of two ways: painting from observation or from literary sources. Life and its mysteries are abiding questions. Her compositions are always non-photographic, but based on the imprint of memory, and principally, on the act of painting itself. By stressing substance over verisimilitude, Seo allows multiple narratives to inhabit her work simultaneously. Colour and shape fold into environment, dancing amid the density of freely applied oil paint. The resulting paintings often have a sense of sensual wildness, as if Seo is wrestling with the messiness of life. 

Each painting is a riddle. Through the process of painting, Seo poses an intimate query and posits a possible answer. In her second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, titled O love, how did you get here?, Seo revisits the same image through a number of paintings made over an extended period of time, asking if time itself changes perspective. In the series Your Nakedness, the artist came across some trees with oddly shaped humps and knots while walking in London; she was intrigued by their shape and how, over time, memory transforms what she actually saw. Certain curves or undulations are emphasised, while the texture and tone of the undulating branches shift as the memory recedes in time. 

Seo deploys a wide-ranging vocabulary of colour, tone and mark-making to delineate psychological interludes at once familiar and uncanny but uniquely her own. The double act of the Old painter’s Nightmare and the Old painter’s sweet dream (2025) are loosely based on reading Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (1886). A storey of an old painter’s passion for painting and strong drive for success mixed with fear of failure, the image is rendered twice. His eyes are closed, the legs exposed up top crotch level, and a blanket over his chest and arms is rendered in soft cream or pink. The viewpoint is from above, suggestive of both spectator and nurse, while the background is indicative of emotional vulnerability. Here Seo’s mastery in her craft is displayed in a whirlwind of indigos and magentas. Figures and other lifeforms stir and recede into aqueous grounds of patterned colour. Foreground and background, negative and positive space, work in tandem to create two arresting images.

In the series Touching and suckling, the snail is a frail and vulnerable character, hiding amongst the luscious bounty of nature, bulbs filled with nectar overflowing. Seo also shows us the true nature of the beast, eager and devouring on the flowers. Snails play a surprising and extensive part in art: Dali used them as images of impotence, while medieval painters included them in paintings of the Virgin Mary to refer to her modesty. Seo’s snails are secretive succubi, as if hiding from fear and shame of their desirous consumption of the flowers. She likens the snails to the desires of babies suckling on their mothers’ breasts, at once innocent and voracious. The bulbs are rendered in majestic greens, purples and reds, overlaid on top of cascading streams of blues, oranges and yellows. They are painted without context of place and time, as if the dance between snail and flower is eternal.