SEO

The Korean artist SEO is a student of Georg Baselitz, and this year’s winner of the Bad Homburg Rotary Club’s award for young artists. In the exhibition Blickachsen 5, she is showing Meine deutschen Träume (My German Dreams): according to the artist, this installation goes back to an actual dream from 2003, in which she heard the German word ‘warum’ (‘why’) for the first time, and woke up, frightened. In the following months of engaging with her host country Germany and its particular qualities, three allegorical symbols crystallized for SEO all things typically German: a garden gnome, a beer barrel, and deer antlers. The deer antlers stand for power and potency, the beer for conviviality, an easygoing sociality and warm-heartedness, and the gnome for order and diligence. In the rotunda of the Kaiser Wilhelm Bad, these German qualities encounter rice, a symbol of the artist’s country of origin: a meeting of East and West.