Artist
Eunjung Seo Feleppa
@wild.hokshi
Eunjung Seo Feleppa (서은정) is a painter. She studied Fine Art at Hong- Ik University, Seoul and has exhibited in numerous galleries both in the UK and internationally, such as at the Museum of Modern Art and Gallery Pfo in Korea, and at Highgate Fine Art, Sutton House, Kingston Museum, the Han Collection and the Korean Cultural Centre in London. Eunjung is a member of ArtCan, and was the recipient of the 2022 ArtCan Prize, winning a solo exhibition at D Contemporary, London, 2023. Her artworks have been selected for the ING Discerning Eye art competition at the Mall Galleries in 2022 and 2024.
Q1. What inspires the artist?
Eunjung Seo Feleppa is inspired by the colours around her. She particularly loves using a warm colour palette, which is ideal for expressing various skin tones. Warm, analogous colours energise her even if the painting conveys sad emotions. Eunjung believes that faces represent a person's life story and emotions. She paints them as portraits when they convey something she understands. Each portrait has its own odyssey. It begins with emotions but develops in unforeseen colours, textures and abstractions.
Q2. What does being a female artist mean?
Eunjung is not overtly conscious about being a female artist, although most of her portraits are female and display delicate, sensitive qualities from a female gaze. Her portraits often resemble something in herself, projecting her own emotions and soul. While some viewers might find the portraits sad, she sees these emotions as part of human nature, hoping that both men and women recognise these feelings from their own lives.
Q3. How does Korean culture influence artist's art?
Eunjung states that as her mother tongue is Korean, she is Korean, and she is deeply interested in Korean culture even though she lives and works in London. She loves listening to Korean indie music and enjoys watching Korean dramas. Even some of Korean romantic dramas have cliché moments, she often finds a lot of 정 (‘jeong’, Korean affection) and different emotions, which are good raw materials for her art.
Q4. Who are the female artist role models, and why?
Eunjung likes Marlene Dumas’s expressive portraits. Dumas starts with an image from a visual archive (mass media), but the finished painting is a different entity. Dumas acknowledges the tension between the painterly gesture and the source image. Her portraits are not interested in the resemblance to the original source; rather, they focus on the artist’s own interpretation of the psychology within the subject.
Q5. What projects are currently being worked on?
Eunjung is preparing for a group exhibition with the theme Colours. Each participating artist must choose one color, and she chose brown. In her art, she paints different colours of faces, with brown as the base of any skin tone. She explores all primary colours through various shades of brown, creating a wide range within the colour spectrum.
According to Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, one of art’s important functions is reminding us what’s important to us. Here, Enjung painted a happy memory from her childhood, a summer holiday at the sea. Her face conveys calm, happiness, a desire for life, and hope for the future.
Wearing Mum’s Sunglasses, 2022
Oil on fabric stretched on a canvas frame,
20.3 x 25.4 cm
Eunjung, 2023
Oil on linen canvas, 28 x 35 cm
Emergence, 2024
Oil on canvas, 25.4 x 30.5 cm
Eunjung painted this self-portrait from a photo taken in her early twenties, who had youthful, piercing eyes and tightly closed lips. Eunjung initially painted this painting as a realistic self-portrait, but at a later stage, she introduced intense random colours to the subject, forming abstract painterly patches. Perhaps she wanted to express her vibrant youth and energy from the past in this portrait.