“Untitled” (1960) is one of Seundja Rhee’s early works when she was shifting from representational to abstract paintings after graduating from the Academie. This period, which has been referred to as her era of “women and earth,” is considered to begin from 1961, yet this piece displays formative characteristics suitable enough to be categorized into the earlier era of women and earth. During this period, Rhee caught the maternal instinct of the earth that conceives and nurtures lives, which she equated with the act of drawing with one brush stroke after another as she worked on this piece. The canvas filled with short, square-shaped strokes in warm, neutral colors evokes the earth in warm spring sunlight. Two circles resembling the sun and the moon are placed on the right side of the painting, one on the top and the other on the bottom, respectively. These round shapes contrast with the four-cornered “L”-shape that evokes a rice paddy or field―a composition that infuses energy and life into the painting.
Seundja Rhee (1918-2009) graduated from Jinju Girls’ High School, Jinju, Korea and Jissen Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan. She went to France in 1951 and studied fine arts from 1953 at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris and resided and pursued her art in France ever since. Rhee took part in the Bienal de Sao Paulo as the Korean representative along with Kim Whanki, Nam Kwan, and Lee Ungno. She was the recipient of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government in 1991 as well as the Precious Crown Order of Cultural Merit from the Korean government in 2009.
Seundja Rhee is a naturalist abstract painter who utilized a variety of media including oil painting, printmaking, tapestry, and ceramics, to depict various subject matter such as women, earth, city and nature, yin and yang, and the universe through lyrical and Eastern images. While she was pursuing her artistic studies at the Academie, she delved into representational painting expressed through relatively dark colors and thick matiere, but later Rhee shifted to abstract paintings of landscapes. From 1961 to 1968 when the theme of her works was women and earth, the colors grew brighter with neutral tints, and the brushstrokes split up into smaller units that resembled a pointillist touch that turned into geometric marks laden with symbolic meaning, thereby creating an abstract style unique to Seundja Rhee. After visiting New York in 1969, the city as a theme became a recurrent motif in her oeuvre, with works overlapping and combining formative symbols of dots and lines, East and West, and nature and city making their appearance. Rhee chose “circle” to symbolize a future city that blends each opposing component in a harmonious manner, using this symbol as her motif ever since. Rhee’s circle not only symbolizes the nucleus of a cell―the one and only existence from the beginning and the source of life―but also the modality and principles of the universe and all creations in it. All things are divided and transform indefinitely, but once they encounter one another again, they form a single circular unit, which is the original state of existence. Her colors deviated from neutral tints to blues and reds after the 1970s. In the late 1970s, representational nature appeared again behind the symbolic form of the circle. Mountains occasionally made an appearance on her canvas, yet mostly, the heavens represented Mother Nature, with Rhee’s gaze gradually going beyond the heavens towards space. In the end, she attempted to symbolize and depict the universe as a space for all existence to be in harmony and beauty.
