SUEIM KOO

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Sueim Koo creates abstract landscapes as visual expressions of emotions and memories. Her work is informed by her diaries kept since adolescence, that are filled with emotional events and everyday observations. A pivotal experience that shaped her artistic sensibility occurred at age seventeen, when her childhood home in Seoul’s Jong-Ro neighborhood was lost to government-led modernization, leaving a lasting imprint on her teenage years. Decades later, she revisits excerpts from the journals to create art as a cathartic means of reconciling with that loss. Her paintings, emerging as dreamlike interior landscapes rather than direct depictions of nature, translate written memories into visual narratives through color, composition, and form. Each artworks title is drawn from the journal pages, while fragments of rice paper, painted paper, and magazine cuttings are layered onto the canvas as mnemonic traces. Each element contributing to a meditative dialogue with herself. Ultimately, her creative process transcends aesthetics, serving as an act of reconstruction and interpretation of memory, a way to reclaim what has slipped away, and to capture fleeting moments that connect the past, present, and future.

Bio:

Sueim Koo embarked on a new chapter of her life by immigrating to the United States at 36 and pursuing art later in life, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from SUNY Purchase at 50 and furthering her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Her work has been widely exhibited, with notable solo shows at the Art Wall of Belskie Museum of Art and Science in NJ, the Edward Hopper House in NY, and Piermont Flywheel Gallery in NY, and has appeared in prestigious venues including the Islip Art Museum, National Art League, Prince Street Gallery, George Bills Gallery in NYC, Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn, Flushing Town Hall, Queens College Art Center, the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., Monmouth Museum in NJ, and Woodstock Artist Association and Museum in NY. Koo has also gained international recognition through participation in art fairs such as the Affordable Art Fair in NYC, Aqua Art Show in Miami, and Gwang Hwa Moon International Art Fair in Seoul, and in 2015 was one of two Korean artists featured at “Korea Night” hosted by the International House of Philadelphia. She has served as a board member of The Garage Art Center since 2020 and Secretary to the President of the New York Society of Women Artists since 2015.