JEENHO SEO: THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT


by Annette Hur

"My recent work is about exploring other ways to communicate within the boundaries of the existing imagery or symbols using body as a tool"
- Jeenho

Jeenho Seo: The benefit of the doubt
 
 


Seo’s work explores the social expectations and bigotry of individuals’ linguistic behavior in regard to their gender, race, and social class. In his recent body of work, Seo’s own experience of shifting social projections on speaker agency between the United States and South Korea has deeply prevailed in the artist’s mind.

The word ‘mouth’, a space where we form the words to speak, has become an allegorical noun to describe ‘what we speak’ in many languages. Seo delves into the idea that the space inside of a mouth is where he holds thoughts, limits the agency, reforms words, and sometimes swallows everything to meet a certain social stratification or assumptions around him.

Each cast of the negative space of the artist’s own mouth represents a personal experience of endangered speaker agency or limited verbal communication in social settings of different cultures he lives in. In ‘Twilight’ the casted form extends through the wall and the floor with long stems mimicking the route of trachea-breathing-, not leading to a specific place but back to itself after a complex entanglement of self-doubt.


The table installation includes five different casted pieces that contain rice, different kinds of traditional Korean soups, a green tea bag, or white bread symbolizing the mundane staple food from Seo’s daily life in Korea and in the United States. The simple yet denotive presentation quietly depicts the uncommunicative or unuttered table manners that are commonly expected during a family mealtime in South Korea.

- Annette Hur

"Depends, is an interactive sculpture where the viewer is welcomed to spin the work and feel, make noise with the piece and leave the image as they want to"

Jeenho Seo (b.1989) is a multi-media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in South Korea and was raised in the UK and Korea. He earned his MFA at Yale in Sculpture; BFA in East Asian Painting and Sculpture at Hong-ik University. He explores his artistic expression eclectically through installation, sculpture, performance and photography. He has previously shown his art in Seoul, New Haven and New York. 

work list (from the top)

“For”
2022
7 x 9 x 30 inch
thermoplastic polymer

“Twilight”
2022
Variable dimension
thermoplastic polymer

"The table"
2022
Installation
Packaged seaweed soup, spicy mushroom soup, rice, whitebread, green tea, poly-optic, polyurethane, thermoplastic polymer, plate, folk, knife, stainless bowl, spoon, chopsticks

“Depends”
2022
19 x 19 x 3.5 inch
rice, various packaged food and drinks, polyurethane, poly-optic, polyester, wood, plexiglass, ball bearing swivel

Photo: Jenny Gorman