Seongyeon Jo's photography captures a delicate gaze and a sense of communion with the objects, landscapes, and plants of the everyday. She focuses on the seemingly trivial things in her surroundings, collecting and recontextualizing them to explore unexpected visual tension and shifts in sensation.
Her major works include the ‹still alive› and ‹Waxing and Waning› series, which visually document and reconstruct plants collected through her own cultivation. The ‹A Complete Coincidence› series explores the unfamiliar and isolated life during the pandemic through streetscapes and still lifes. In her most recent work, ‹Become a part of something›, she moves beyond simply capturing and reassembling fragmented objects. She physically intervenes by applying stitches directly to the surface of her photographs, an act that re-weaves the connections between the preserved moments.
Beginning with her solo exhibition «KISIKAM» in 1999 (Dam Gallery, Seoul), she has held about 15 solo exhibitions, with her most recent being «A Complete Coincidence» in 2021 (SPACE SO, Seoul). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including «No Signal»(2024, Daegu Arts Center, Daegu), «Vita Nova_New Life»(2022, Incheon Art Platform, Incheon), «Forest of Sense»(2021, Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeongju), and «SIX PERSPECTIVES»(2020, Gwangju National Museum, Gwangju). Her series ‹still alive› and ‹Waxing and Waning›, which focus on cultivation in unstable urban public lands and chronicle the growth and decay of plants, were published in the photobook 『Arranging Life』(2018, Datz Press). Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Art Bank, Datz Museum of Art, Paradise Group, Konkuk University Medical Center, and the Consulate-General of Japan in Sendai, among others.
