Artist
Eunjung Seo Feleppa
@wild.hokshi
Eunjung Seo Feleppa (서은정) is a painter,
Q1. What inspires the artist?
Eunjung Seo Feleppa is inspired by the colours around us. She particularly loves using a warm colour palette, which is good for expressing various types of skin tones. Using a warm, analogous colour scheme makes her feel energised after she paints, even if the painting conveys sad emotions. Faces embody a person’s life story and emotions, and often become portraits when they convey something she understands. Each portrait follows its own odyssey, triggered by emotions and resulting in unforeseen colours, textures, and abstractions.
Q2. What does being a female artist mean?
Eunjung Seo Feleppa 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 universally human, hoping that both men and women recognise these feelings from their own lives.
Q3. How does Korean culture influence artist's art?
Eunjung Seo Feleppa 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 Seo Feleppa 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 Seo Feleppa 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 colors of faces, with brown as the base of any skin tone. She explores all primary colors through various shades of brown, creating a wide range within the color spectrum.
One of the important functions in art is to remember what is important to us, according to Alain de Botton and John Armstrong. I painted one of my happy memories from my childhood, a summer holiday at the sea. Here, my face conveys calm, happiness, a desire for life, and hope for the future.
Wearing Mum’s Sunglasses
c.2022
Oil on fabric stretched on a canvas frame,
20.3 x 25.4 cm
I painted this self-portrait from a photo from my early twenties. I have youthful, piercing eyes and determined lips. This portrait started as a realistic one but at a later stage, some colours jumping out of the subject became abstract painterly patches. Perhaps, I wanted to express a vibrant youth and sunny energy in this portrait.
Eunjung
c.2023
Oil on linen canvas, 28 x 35 cm
I painted this self-portrait from a photo from my early twenties. I have youthful, piercing eyes and determined lips. This portrait started as a realistic one but at a later stage, some colours jumping out of the subject became abstract painterly patches. Perhaps, I wanted to express a vibrant youth and sunny energy in this portrait.
Emergence
c.2024
Oil on canvas, 25.4 x 30.5 cm