Won Seoungwon is a natural-born storyteller. This is evident not only when speaking with her but also in her artworks, which are filled with rich and abundant narratives. Just as words come together to form sentences, and sentences accumulate to create a novel, she combines around two thousand individual photographic images into the construction of a single intriguing story. The characteristics she had since childhood—talking incessantly when someone was around and drawing when alone—manifest most vividly in her work today.

Since her first photographic work My Life in 1999, Won has spent the past twenty years presenting collage-based works grounded in photography. She has constructed stories about herself, the people around her, and the members of our society, often through allegorical or symbolic language. As more people find her stories compelling and relatable, her narratives have grown stronger and more captivating. And before anyone realized it, the artist who once appeared in her show as 《1978, My Age of Seven》 has now reached middle age.
 


Anxiety at Seven

One morning, she overslept and awoke to an unnervingly quiet house. Her mother was nowhere to be found. She checked the kitchen and every corner of the home, but everything was empty. A sudden surge of fear, anxiety, and the feeling of being abandoned overwhelmed her. Such a chilling experience is likely not hers alone.

Her exhibition 《1978, My Age of Seven》 unfolds against this emotional backdrop.

What can a seven-year-old child do in such a situation? The only possible action is to swing open the front door and run out in search of her mother. But the world outside is far from kind to a child.

In the deepest, most hidden room of the artist’s inner world—the room that led her to choose the demanding yet fulfilling path of an artist—lived that seven-year-old child who had experienced the absence of her mother and vaguely sensed that she had to separate from her and step into the world.

That young girl filled every spare moment with drawing, and her love for making things eventually led her to major in sculpture at Chung-Ang University. After graduation, she left for Germany, where at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf she learned, in earnest, what it means to live as an artist.

“My professor once told me, ‘You are young, so your work will continue to grow. But what matters is that no matter what hardships come, no matter what criticisms arise, you must never shrink away. You must be able to explain and justify your work with confidence.’”

For Won, Professor Klaus Rinke was a mentor who trained her to speak about her work with bravery and conviction in front of others. He also played a critical role in leading her toward the photographic, collage-based practice she pursues today.

“Actually, when I first entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, I chose installation art. Though I’m physically small, I’ve always loved large-scale installations and big works.”

But that choice backfired. She ambitiously presented a large-scale piece during her first-semester critique and received praise, but the effort exhausted her so severely that she had to be hospitalized. Because of repeated hospital stays and outpatient treatments, she could not properly attend class.

“At the end of each semester, the professor must decide whether to keep the student in their class. If you don’t get your professor’s signature, you can’t stay at the school unless another professor chooses to take you. My professor struggled for a week before ultimately deciding not to sign. He told me, ‘Large-scale installation work is too much for you. You’re not strong enough physically, and you don’t speak well. It will be difficult for you to be an artist. I won’t sign because I want you to have time to find another career.’ In short, I was kicked out.”

It was a moment of complete despair. She returned to her tiny 2m x 4m room and, before packing her belongings, decided to photograph everything in it. Laying white paper in the center of the room, she photographed every trivial object—medicine packets, her mother’s letters, worn socks, bits of leftover bread—one by one. The images totaled 628. Wanting to see them all at once, she went early one morning to an empty school building, arranged them on the wall, and sat contemplating them for a long time. She sensed someone standing beside her, quietly looking at the photographs. It was Professor Rinke.

After hearing the story behind the photographs, he made an unexpected proposal: “This is incredibly honest work. Can you come to my class tomorrow and explain this piece?”

The Beginning of Her Photographic Practice

The 1999 work My Life became the piece that pulled her back from the edge of a cliff and opened a path toward new possibilities. From that moment, she began producing digital, photography-based work in earnest. It also became the turning point that led her to graduate from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2002 and continue her studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

“I ended up spending eleven years in Germany—from 1995 to 2006—during which I found the direction of my work as an artist.”

My Life, a project in which she narrated her own story through her room and personal objects, developed into Dreamroom, where she transformed the spaces of people around her into the dream rooms they longed for. Her friends lived in cramped real-life quarters—one friend who loved water received an aquarium-like room; another, fascinated by prehistoric life, was given a room reminiscent of a natural cave; and for herself, always longing for warmth and nature, she created a room filled with primeval forest.

After returning to Korea, Won presented 《1978, My Age of Seven》 in 2010, gaining major attention in the Korean art scene. Her shift from the stories of those around her back to her own narrative stemmed from a growing psychological unease—inner anxiety and panic disorder. During therapy and psychoanalytic sessions, she realized that the seven-year-old child, still crouched in fear within her, remained unresolved.

“When I was little, I lived with a large extended family. But when I was seven, my mother began working. From then on, without understanding why, I waited all day for her to return. I lived in constant fear of what might happen if she didn’t come back.”

Afterward, the themes of Won’s work expanded again—from herself to the stories of people around her, and ultimately to the stories of broader social groups. Her 2017 exhibition 《The Sight of the Others》 explicitly identifies professions—public officials, journalists, professors, financiers—in the titles of the works, making her intentions unmistakably clear.

The work The Quarries of Financiers depicts a barren landscape: dry stone mountains, withered trees, sagging electric wires, and lamps glowing intermittently. She portrays financiers as people who have the power to turn stones into gold. The drooping electrical wires resemble fluctuating stock-market graphs, and the glowing bulbs hint at incoming money. However, the implication that gold can turn back into stone at any moment contains an inherent irony.

Her works embed dense symbolic codes, and deciphering these symbols—connecting them, inferring them—creates the pleasure of reading her images as stories.

As for her most recent exhibition, the 2021 series 《The Inaudible Audible》, the puzzle-like process of reading her stories becomes far simpler, while the visual completeness of each work becomes far more pronounced. Even the titles—such as The Weight-Clad Light, Ordinary Network, and The Blue Potential of a White Branch—are less concrete than before. Thus, compared to earlier works, narrative elements are reduced, but their visual impact is immediate and powerful. If one were to describe the shift in literary terms, it feels like moving from prose to poetry.

A Work Composed of Two Thousand Parts

“In the past, a single work might have used around a thousand images; gradually the number increased, and now it surpasses two thousand. But I no longer want to count how many images I use. It’s not essential. What matters is the completion of the work itself.”

Looking closely at her work, one finds landscapes that appear realistic yet strangely unfamiliar. The trees, water, grass, and fields that fill the frame are all based on photographs she physically collects—making them grounded in reality. But she does not photograph a subject in a single shot. For example, one tree might be photographed in sixty separate cuts, all to maintain consistent distance and perspective. Because she stitches these images together, the final scene carries an uncanny dissonance that does not align with normal optical perception. It’s the kind of perspective that would only be possible if one were floating in the air looking down, yet it unfolds naturally across the image.

“When I have collected the photographic materials, I sit in front of the computer and begin assembling each small fragment to construct the story. Through adding, erasing, and adjusting colors in Photoshop, I create a landscape that both exists in this world and does not.”

Each fragment once belonged to a completely different context, but as the tiny pieces accumulate and merge, they evolve into entirely new narratives. Because of this process, Won produces at most one or two works a year—the creation time is extraordinarily long and strenuous.

To produce a single work, she takes tens of thousands of photographs, selects thousands, and pastes them one by one into a single frame. This collage process requires months, sometimes years.

Once she has a concept, she makes a drawing to envision how the final work will appear. Then she goes out to shoot the images she needs. If a work typically requires around two thousand photographic fragments, one can imagine how many total shots are needed—and even then, suitable weather, seasons, and landscapes must align. The photographic stage alone is extremely demanding, but the digital process that follows is even more so.

“Working ten hours a day is normal for me. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Do I really need to work this hard?’ But if I start choosing easier paths, I feel like I would lose the attraction of the work itself.

Life may be hardship—but the process of immersing myself in the world of the computer, imagining endlessly, and creating that imagination into images, that’s joy. It’s closer to meditation than suffering.”

Because she works alone from beginning to end, she is always short on time. She dedicates as much of her life as possible to her work and reduces her everyday life to its minimum, living in a simplified, almost ascetic way.

In her words: “My life may not go the way I want, but my work can. When I sit at the computer, I live in a world where nothing is impossible. Even if I had all the comfort and abundance in life, if I weren’t an artist—if I lived an ordinary life—I don’t think I would be happy.”

The Desire for Space

When examined closely, the long arc of Won’s artistic narrative ultimately begins with space. Her earliest collage work, My Life, was born from the 3-pyeong (approximately 9.9 square meters) room in which she lived, where she photographed and revealed the small, ordinary objects that structured her daily life.

Later, Dreamroom emerged from her attention to the spaces of her friends. And the subsequent works, which unfold across vast and expansive landscapes, likewise reveal how deeply the artist is drawn to, and desires, space.

“I’ve always been drawn to things that are big and vast. Reality may impose limitations, but through the camera I can bring these grand environments into my world and create expansive realms, sharing the vastness inside my mind with others.”

Because she enters the world inside her monitor every day, she says her real-life room no longer feels small. She begins with a blank white space, and as more and more fragments accumulate within it, mountains and seas, forests and rivers gradually appear. Within these paradisiacal landscapes, she experiences a sense of freedom and happiness. And as this happiness unfolds into vivid, flavorful stories, the eyes and ears of the viewer, too, are delighted.

References

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  [Column] Stories Heard Through Images