Jusun Jessie
Seo
Media:
Painting, Multi-Disciplinary
Studio Location:
43-01 22nd st, Long Island City, NY, 11101
Room/Studio#
250
Website:
Artist Bio:
Jusun Seo is a visual artist working primarily with painting and collaborative projects. Her practice explores questions of place, social norms, and belonging, often drawing from lived experience and shared processes. Born in South Korea, she later moved to the Bay Area, California, an experience that continues to shape her work. She received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2020. During this time, she co-founded the artist collective WEDAPEPO with six artists, developing projects across online platforms and in-person settings, and co-curating exhibitions, including at Root Division in San Francisco. She later relocated to New York, where she earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and received the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award. Seo has exhibited at Woman Made Gallery (Chicago) and Thierry Goldberg Gallery (New York). She is currently artist fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and has presented talks and lectures at the School of Visual Arts, Woman Made Gallery, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Artist Statement:
My practice is rooted in the body, the one I inhabit, and the ones that appear through images, objects, and the quiet architectures of memory. Through the lens of my given identity as an Asian American woman, I have long felt the weight of how identity is arranged, interpreted, or obscured by cultural expectations. Early works moved through these tensions by examining the ways bodies and cultures become held, traded, or framed in the still-life figures of Pulse (2019), emptied of faces, the catalogued “traditional” objects in Objects (2023), flattened into
souvenirs by online marketplaces. Over time, my attention has turned toward the spaces between these structures, the places where external pressures slip inward and become sensations, doubts, and lingering questions. Rather than confronting power directly, I find myself listening to the quieter shifts: how time
contracts and stretches, how a body measures space simply by inhabiting it, how an image becomes a threshold between what is seen and what is assumed. In Vitruvian Woman (2024), the figure reaches toward the edges of the canvas not only as a critique of constraint but as an attempt to understand the boundaries that define experience from within. My current work follows these subtler traces. It moves through the philosophical landscapes that open when one lives in translation, between cultures, between screens, between the roles
demanded by labor and the ones sustained by imagination. I seek to reveal the conditions beneath perception between the inherited narratives, digital echoes, and shifting temporalities.
