Sueim Koo

STORY

“Art” is a word I had never thought about until later in life. In high school in Korea I liked to draw and paint very much, and I was interested in learning more, but I had never seen an actual work of art in my country. However, my mother advised me, following the old Korean thinking, that art is a lower class field and not fit for her daughter, or for any woman for that matter. I followed my mother’s wishes and did not think about drawing and painting again until years later when I was standing in front of paintings made by students at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. I would often walk past the student exhibitions when I took ESL classes at BCC, and I enjoyed looking at the artwork. Just like that, I had an encounter with art in the hallway of BCC and it changed something inside me forever. The students’ imaginative work opened up a new world to me and created a kind of spark of joy in my mind that I refer to as the “art spirit.” This experience encouraged me to apply to BCC as a matriculated art student. My journey to becoming an artist had officially begun.

When I started my art career, I was an ordinary middle-aged immigrant woman. Like all other immigrants, I faced far more problems than I expected. There were language barriers, hours of housework, and I worked fifteen hours a day while also taking care of my son. I floundered quite a bit in my new life. It was so busy and hectic during this time that I didn’t even go on a small family vacation for nearly ten years, let alone eat a decent meal every day. Although I sometimes felt like dropping dead, I worked diligently in order to set up a completely new life in America. I didn’t complain because I was brought up to believe that these were typical women’s responsibilities. Also, most importantly, I had to support my son to insure that he had a bright future.

There were other barriers to my career as an artist. After I received an associate’s degree from BCC, I had to run our family’s restaurant business. The concept of art once again moved away from me. During this time I was involved in a serious car accident when a truck collided with my car on the highway. Due to complications with my health, the doctors forbade me from working for several months. At first I did not know what to do with all my free time. However, while organizing the house I found my old paintbrushes and my artwork. Suddenly these things brought back the idea of the spirit of art that had been so important to me. The unfortunate car accident and my recovery proved to be a positive turning point in my life. Without the free time at home I may not have had a chance to make art again. I decided to pursue the spark of joy that I had experienced years before.

When I was forty-five years old I was accepted as an art student at SUNY Purchase College. I learned many things at SUNY Purchase and had an amazing experience there. While my classes seemed to be too hard for a middle age woman with a language barrier and a full time job, I looked forward to each class and each new challenge. Studying art gave me my own dream – to be a creative person through art. My mother wanted an obedient daughter, not a creative daughter. She didn’t realize that she had influenced my artistic spirit. My mother designed and produced hanbok dresses and had her own dress shop. I grew up surrounded by different shapes and colors of fabrics, mostly silk and delicate muslin. I even played with the beautiful fabric when I was a child. Hanbok dresses are very elegant and graceful traditional Korean dresses, which are worn for special occasions. My mother became a widow at the age of 32, and had to raise four children alone. She had dementia for the last five years of her life and passed away two years ago. She didn’t know that she gave the most precious things in her life to her youngest daughter. My mother saw my artwork, but she couldn’t remember it.  When my mother was cremated, I burned one of my favorite works together with her. I wanted it to be taken to heaven with her. I believe that my mother wanted her youngest daughter to continue to preserve the artistic spirit forever.

My works are abstract landscapes that represent my emotions and memories including memories of my mother. My primary source of inspiration is my diaries that I have kept since I was a teenager. The background of these imaginative landscapes is the story of the neighborhood where I grew up in Seoul, Korea. When I was a teenager, the area where I had lived since childhood was demolished according to Korea’s Urban Reconstruction Plan. I watched bulldozers break down houses one by one every day.  I felt the importance of my teenage years was being town down because each location in the town recalled special moments and memories for me. My mother’s dress shop where I played with fabrics was gone, and so was a theater where I saw movies, and the corner store where I could catch sight of handsome boys walking by. All the places that were important to me were destroyed forever. Decades later as an adult I began to make art based on passages from my teenage diary as a way of coming to terms with the loss of my childhood home. In recent years my work refers to other experiences and ideas, but it continues to be directly inspired by my writing. Rather than literal depictions of nature, my works are like interior or spiritual landscapes, representing thoughts, feelings and memories

When I came to America it was like restarting life from square one since I had to overcome so many cultural and language barriers. However, those hard times encouraged me to ponder the essence of life and what attitude is needed to overcome hardship. This is the attitude I learned while viewing and studying art. I learned to see all things and situations in life from different angles, instead of from only one side. I developed ways to understand others from different perspectives. Ultimately, art helped me muster the courage to take my many experiences in America, even painful and sad ones, and turn to them into unique visual memories. So now, at age sixty, I have begun a new phase of life as an artist.

In the almost ten years since I received a BFA from SUNY Purchase College my work has been exhibited in the United States and Korea, with four solo shows at Piermont Flywheel Gallery in Piermont, NY, as well as at the Edward Hopper House, Nyack, NY, and Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ. My work has been included in numerous galleries and museums, including the Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; National Art League, Prince Street Gallery, and George Bills Gallery, New York, NY; Space 776 and Powerhouse Books, Brooklyn, NY; Flushing Town Hall and Queens College Art Center, Queens, NY; Korea Cultural Center, Washington, D.C.; Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ; and the Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, Woodstock, NY. I have participated in several art fairs including the Affordable Art Fair, New York, NY; Aqua Art Show, Miami, FL; and the Gwang Hwa Moon Int’l Art Fair, Seoul, Korea, In 2015, I was selected as one of two representative Korean artists at a special event called “Korea Night” hosted by the International House of Philadelphia, and I was interviewed by Korea KTC TV about my work. The family business is now running well.  My son, who had complained about not having family vacations and was teased about being an Asian boy who couldn’t speak English, is now a lawyer.

I am an ordinary woman, wife, mother and artist.  As I continue my journey, I hope to fill the empty canvases with full of precious times of my life.

Sueim Koo