Seo Monograph - Tapa dura

She has been called a symbol of a new globalised generation. In Korea, SEO is regarded as an almost official representative of the country and as one of the world-class artists Korea has given birth to. SEO was born Soo-Kyoung Seo in the South Korean city of Gwangju, 330 km to the south of the capital Seoul, in 1977. Enraptured, some of her countrymen see her as a Cinderella in BerlinA". This praise is not least due to the renowned art collections that have works by the 32-year-old artist in their possession and have brought her much initial renown, including New York's Judith Rothschild Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art. SEO has had a fairytale career. She moved to Berlin in 2001 to study with Georg Baselitz, where, through her art as well as worldly, non-artistic adventures, she investigated the rites of everyday German life on the lookout for the peculiar and surprising. SEO now proclaims self-confidently, I am a German artistA". SEO unites Asian and European elements in her pieces. She makes use of an exceptional artistic process to create her works: Thousands of paper strips are affixed to the canvas - collage-like - painted, pasted over and then painted again to compose fascinating pictures with an extraordinary structure and depth that "illustrate the essence of things and not the immediately apparentA".

Christoph Tannert is an art historian, curator and critic who lives in Berlin and has been manager of the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin since 2000.