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“눈물의 표면장력 05 (Surface Tension 05)” by 이목하 / Moka Lee (Korean) - Oil on cotton / 2023 - Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #MokaLee #이목하 #SeMA #SeoulMuseumofArt #서울시립미술관 #artText #art #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaWoman #ContemporaryArt #WomenPaintingWomen
The title, “surface tension,” names the physics of a droplet holding together, and it becomes a metaphor for emotion that gathers but does not fall. Korean artist Moka Lee (이목하) depicts this pressure through restraint via a cropped frame, an averted gaze, and paint handling that recalls the blunt clarity of a photographic flash translated into oil. This close-up, nearly life-size portrait of a young Asian woman fills the canvas. She has straight, long black hair that falls across her forehead and partially shadows one eye. Her skin is light with a cool cast while her cheeks and nose are softly flushed, as if from cold air or held-back emotion. She wears a roomy mint-green coat over a white top, the collar wide and slightly rumpled. One hand grips a dark handbag strap near her shoulder, pulling it inward, while the other arm disappears out of frame. A small faint blueish hoop earring catches light at her ear. She tilts her head and looks upward and to the side, lips gently pressed, expression poised between calm and the brink of tears. The background is a muted gray, keeping all attention on her face and the tension in her posture. The scale makes her feel present, as if you’ve stepped into someone’s private pause. Paint edges remain soft in places (like hair dissolving into shadow) while highlights on the cheeks and the coat’s seams sharpen the sense of immediacy. Based in Seoul, Korea, Lee often works from images encountered through social media and other everyday experiences, turning anonymous “found” faces into portraits that hold both intimacy and distance. Rather than telling us who she is, the unidentified woman becomes a screen for shared, contemporary feelings including quiet anxiety, self-consciousness, and vulnerability held just under a composed surface. Made in 2023, “Surface Tension 05” reflects Lee’s ongoing interest in how snapshots can look like immediate and timely stories … while often keeping the deepest story just out of our reach.
February 17, 2026 at 2:44 AM
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내 슬픈 전설의 22페이지 (Page 22 in My Sorrowful Legend) by 천경자 / Chun Kyung-ja (South Korean) - Pigment on mulberry paper / 1977 - Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea #WomenInArt #ChunKyungja #천경자 #Kyungja #KoreanArt #artText #art #AsianArt #KoreanArtist #AsianArt #서울시립미술관 #SeoulMuseumOfArt #SeMA #SelfPortrait
Painted when Korean artist Chun Kyung-ja (천경자) was in her early fifties yet recalling herself at twenty-two, this work has become one of the most discussed self-portraits in modern Korean art. Curators and art historians describe it as a “page” from the artist’s lifelong legend as a return to the vulnerable age marked by family loss, divorce, and artistic awakening. The young woman artist with long, olive-brown hair fills the vertical frame, her body cropped at the chest against a dense, midnight-blue background. Her face is rendered in cool gray-violet tones with her skin smooth and masklike above a very long, upright neck. Luminous yellow irises ring stark white pupils, giving her gaze an unblinking, otherworldly intensity that seems to look beyond us. Four slender snakes, patterned in greens, golds, and orange, coil like a crown across her forehead, their small heads pointing in different directions. Her lips are a flat, warm orange, closed and unreadable. A single pale pink rosebud rests at the center of her light blue dress, its stem trailing downward. On the left, a vertical column of Korean characters marks the artist’s signature, anchoring this dreamlike, frontal portrait in Chun’s own hand. The crowned snakes echo the many serpents that populate Chun’s oeuvre, a motif she linked to ancient Egyptian cobra emblems as well as to her own psychic guardian as both threat and protector. Here, the snakes form a halo around a figure who kind of reads as witch, martyr, and survivor all at once, while the drooping rose hints at bruised desire and mortality. Some have noted that this image may merge Chun’s younger self with the memory of a beloved sister who died at 22, turning the portrait into a shared, transgenerational self. In the collection of the Seoul Museum of Art, this portrait stands as a key statement of Chun’s “sad legend” to transform the Korean emotional state of han (한) accumulated sorrow and resistance into an icon of fierce, enduring womanhood.
December 8, 2025 at 5:34 AM