Statement

Visual Artist

Works and Lives in Victoria B.C. Canada.

E-mail: willie_seo@hotmail.com  Tel: 250 480 9283

             Identity is ever-changing and is built through one’s physical and mental experiences. My life and my art work are mostly influenced by these experiences. Since I relocated from my mother country—Republic of Korea to Canada, that move has brought me a great deal of adjustment and compromise between the two cultures. With this give and take, the focus of my object making is to collect fragments of the experiences to bridge the cultures. In doing so, I question my identity in the mix of cultures.

             Constructing moments of my experiences with three dimensional sculptures works really well for me because viewers can easily relate to life size objects. In addition, photo-based work in my practice provide a platform to depict realistic, surrealistic, symbolic, and metaphoric moments on a two dimensional surface. Since digital media is ubiquitous in visual arts, my strong knowledge in photography extends to digital media and becomes an effective tool for my practice. However, sometimes one medium doesn’t quite work well so installation helps me to move the question of identity forward. One material or medium meets or confronts another in my installations; the meeting between the two or more elements highlight different experiences to the viewers, as my own culture meets other cultures in Canada.

             I believe that I can engage with viewers in a way that they are able to experience and sense my cultural musings indirectly.