▲ Watercolor artist Ji Eun-soo

Since when I do not know but I started being called ‘artist’. I’m not famous and I’m not brilliant. I just express such things like colors, strength in softness, sincerity, comfort and warmth in my works. I find objects from nature: petal drifting spring, golden rice field, dews on leaves, a woman in cosmos, sunset, etc. And these are closely linked to my childhood memory and the themes of my watercolor works”. – Artist note –

Chuncheon is famous for lakes. If you’re a little more sensitive, it might remind you of a beautiful watercolor. Watercolor artist Ji Eun-soo lives and paints here. She shifts onto canvas the friendly plants around her such as peonies, cosmos, thistles, etc. The symbolic Soyang River and Jung Island also cannot be missed when it comes to Chuncheon and her watercolor works. Empty your mind for a while to let her landscape into your heart. You might feel something warmth inside your heart as the landscape turns cold to warmth. 

“I draw landscape the way it is. I draw rain as rain should be. I draw snow as snow must be. And I draw nature as nature naturally is. People live in nature. People obey to the law of nature to survive. My watercolor works, in a way, resemble this law of nature and the people who carry on their lives in it” says Ji.

Ji can be called as a realist artist. She is truthful to what she feels towards objects in nature and daily life and she shifts them onto canvas as they are. She follows as her heart leads and tries to see the pure sensation nature gives to her.

“The deeper the dream the clearer it becomes. Little by little, without myself knowing, the dream has come near me. And I pick up a brush and draw the dream then I feel like a spring.”

At a stone’s throw on a corner from Ji’s studio is a café where a number of her works are hanging here and there. In the works are paths and pavilions and you might feel you are actually walking the paths and resting in the pavilions. Who knows you might see the hope you are looking for at the end of a path?

<Wild Grapes>, for example, evaporates a sense of underdone sourness similar to countryman’s rough but undefiled heart. “Wild grape tree for me symbolizes abundance. It always stood there no matter how long. My mother sometimes gazed our sorry-looking house for a while and said with a deep sigh “but how lucky we are who at least have a shelter to lay our body down.” 

Ji held her first solo exhibition for one moth this spring at Donggurae Village, Hwacheon County, Gwangwon Province, under the title <Watercolor Journey with Wild Flowers>. “I was much encouraged by Lee Ho-sang the head of the village, senior artists and eventually the support of the county. It felt great to have my first solo exhibition at a place where there are beautiful lake paths and wild flowers.”

Apart from solo exhibition, Ji participated in the Korea Art Festival held at KINTEX, September 2018 and a number of overseas exhibitions in the US and Japan. Although Ji is a watercolor artist, the fields of her interest are wide: photography, movies, music, reading and above all friends. If there are things she likes, there also are people she doesn’t like: people who are inconsiderate, abusing power on the weak, two-faced and promise-breakers. 

“It is my wish that my works would be seen as they are rather than the value of economy.” 

▲ 무궁화종합예술대전 특별상(어사화를 그리며) 2018 Watercolor on Arches 72.7X53.0cm.