Originality & Identity

Won Seoungwon’s artistic practice begins with the question, “Where do stories come from?” Her early work My Life(1999) documented the small objects inside a 2×4m room—pill packets, letters from her mother, socks, and pieces of bread—through 628 photographs that were then compiled as a single work, marking the starting point of transforming the most ordinary traces of her life into a visual narrative. From this work onward, her interest shifted toward “the life she can actually hold onto,” leading to a belief that a small room, its objects, and individual memories can form an entire ‘world.’

Thereafter, ‘space and desire’ became the core axis of her practice. In the ‘Dreamroom’(2000–2004) series, she traveled around the world to collect images that construct the ideal rooms desired by herself and her friends. On top of real one-room apartment photographs, she overlays landscapes such as swamps, rocks, and primeval forests to construct surreal environments. Works such as Dreamroom-Seoungwon (2003) and Dreamroom-Tina(2000) place the narrow, suffocating spaces of reality against “the landscapes of desire lying beneath,” foreshadowing the consistent attitude across her practice—seeing reality and imagination simultaneously.

From the late 2000s, her subject matter expanded outward—from herself, to those around her, and then to broader members of society. The Tomorrow(2008) series and the exhibition 《Tomorrow》(Alternative Space LOOP, 2008) begin from daily episodes of family, friends, and colleagues, forming fictional village scenes where past, present, and imagined future intertwine. The ‘Seven Years Old’(2010) series presented in the solo exhibition 《1978, Seven Years Old》 reconstructs the artist’s first experience of separation from her mother through her niece and a symbolic tree, turning a personal trauma into a narrative of healing. Here, the young niece stands in for the artist at age seven, and the tree symbolizes the absent mother, demonstrating how rewriting one’s own life can open up a path toward empathy.

Since the 2010s, she has expanded from personal narratives to the identities and emotional structures of ‘social subjects.’ In her solo exhibition 《The Sight of the Others》(Arario Gallery, 2017), works such as The Quarries of Financiers(2017) and The Sea of Journalists(2017) metaphorically transform specific professional groups—public officials, journalists, financiers—into rocky mountains, seas, or clusters of animals, questioning how occupations define lives and identities. In her recent solo exhibitions 《Freezing Point of All》(Museum Hanmi, 2022–2023) and 《The Inaudible Audible》(Arario Gallery, 2021), she visualizes superiority and inferiority coexisting within “successful people,” as well as loose networks and anxious mental states, through motifs such as icy mountains, trees, droplets of water, and ‘Ordinary Loose Network,’ thus addressing the psychological landscapes of contemporary individuals on a more universal level.

Style & Contents

Formally, Won Seoungwon’s work is based on digital photo-collage, while in content it encompasses a hybrid of painting, installation, and literary narratives. She records subjects with meticulous precision—photographing a single tree in as many as 60 segments—and assembles hundreds to thousands of images into a single scene as if composing an “image novel.” While My Life constructed an installation-like arrangement of objects inside a room, this spatial sensibility later becomes absorbed into fictional landscapes, making the picture plane itself a stage and a world.

In series such as ‘Dreamroom,’ ‘Tomorrow’, and ‘Seven Years Old’(2012), the imagery always contains “fragments of reality we have seen somewhere,” yet through their unconventional combinations they form worlds of entirely different layers. Works such as Seven Years Old–The Chaos Kitchen(2010), Seven Years Old–Azalea Boiled Rice and Chrysanthemum(2010), and Seven Years Old–Bed-Wetter’s Laundering(2010) transform familiar domestic spaces into psychological environments that simultaneously hold anxiety and comfort, through excessive objects, flora and fauna, and strangely scaled elements. The narrative is conveyed without text, with each scene composed like a children’s story—carrying emotional rise and resolution.

Over time, her collage approach has evolved into more complex and increasingly abstract forms. In 《The Sight of the Others》, the barren rocky terrain, naked trees, sagging electric wires, and lightbulbs in The Quarries of Financiers symbolize professional desires and insecurities, and the circulation of capital. Meanwhile, works such as The Grass That Used to Be There(2022) from 《Freezing Point of All》 and Grand Waterfall(2021) and Ordinary Network(2021) from 《The Inaudible Audible》no longer reveal specific figures or occupations directly. Instead, motifs such as ice, droplets, branches, grass, and loose networks metaphorize “poorly handled inferiority,” “fragile bonds,” and “willpower that grows even in frozen conditions,” shifting the content toward psychological and emotional planes.

The distinct sense of estrangement in her compositions stems from technical decisions. Although based on real landscapes, the scenes are never taken in a single shot but stitched from many segments with slightly mismatched perspectives and vanishing points, producing “impossible landscapes.” The near absence of shadows flattens the image, yet within it coexist multiple times, seasons, elevations, and distances simultaneously. Tens of thousands of shots, thousands of selected elements, and thousands of hand-crafted layers—along with up to ten hours of daily labor—reinsert analog temporality and physicality into a digitally constructed medium. In this way, form and content are inseparable: as she describes, “it’s not the forest, but the story of each tree”—the forest in her work is not a natural sum, but a fabricated relationship formed by thousands of edited fragments.

Topography & Continuity

Won Seoungwon has established a distinct position in contemporary Korean photography and image-making by merging staged photography with narrative-based imagery. Within the strong documentary tradition of Korean photography, she has built a unique middle ground of “fiction grounded in reality” by capturing real objects and landscapes and reconstructing them into newly imagined worlds. Over the past 20 years since My Life, her work has demonstrated that photography can exceed documentation and become a psychological and narrative space.

This approach is reflected in her recognition and institutional presence. Through solo exhibitions such as 《The Sight of the Others》, 《Freezing Point of All》, and 《The Inaudible Audible》, she has examined the lives of social others, her own childhood anxieties, and the inner structures of the successful. She has been selected as the recipient of the 23rd DongGang Photography Award in 2025, establishing her as a key figure in contemporary Korean photography. Her works are housed in major Korean museums—including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Museum Hanmi, and GoEun Museum of Photography—as well as international institutions such as the Osthaus Museum (Germany), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (USA), and Mori Art Museum (Japan), enabling diverse interpretations of her work across cultural contexts.

Her practice holds strong potential for broader international reception, thanks to the universal resonance of her themes—superiority and inferiority, anxiety and relationships, profession and identity, childhood wounds and adult self-understanding. At the same time, the dense symbolic codes drawn from Korean professional structures, social systems, and familial dynamics maintain a grounded locality. It is anticipated that she will continue to develop “expanded narratives dealing with social subjects, collectives, and psychological structures,” persistently generating new scenes at the boundary between reality and imagination.