▲ Watercolor Artist Mihwa Jeon

Watercolor artist Mihwa Jeon majored in westering painting and obtained a master's degree at Sejong University. She has held 19 solo exhibitions and 140 group exhibitions home and aborad including Japan, France and Italy and received a number of prizes including one at the Ho Am Art Museum Grand Exhibition and at the Grand Art Exhibition of Korea. In her childhood, she saw Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci by chance and thought of being an artist one day when she grew up. She carried a replica of the painting in her school bag for 10 years and started to have interest also in Gauguin and Duchamp as she marched onto older years.

"It was quite interesting though that I turned into watercolor instead. I think the reason behind this was that the genre is easily approachable for most art students and we need it anyway for entrance exams. So I started watercolor and I never knew I stuck in that genre more than 30 years. I just take it my calling" looks back Jeon.

However, that does not mean she has only worked on watercolor. She has painted more than 300 oil works during a 20 years span with occasional tries on engraving, tempera, sculpture, acrylic and folk painting as well as installation. 

"Regardless genres, art for me is all about enjoyment. So I wanted to experiment various scopes of enjoyment that a certain art genre could give whether it is watercolor, oil, engraving, sculpture ect. I think same applies to people who find their own attraction to a certain genre."

She said that creating an art work is a process to express one's feeling of the moment or a process to enchant oneself. Whether it is an expression or an enchantment, creating itself make us focus on one thing by removing many trivial thoughts. A job of the artist in this respect is to deliver the moment's expression and enchantment to appreciators. 

"Many of my works are about nature and every day life. It could be a thing or things in nature or it could be a conflict, hope, laugh or breathing in our every day life. The flowers and grass in <Happy Song> symbolize vitality in nature and the harmony between green and blue in <Mysterious Valley> symbolizes the world beyond the painful present. The installation <Ehem> is inspired by works written by Somerset Maugham such as <The Moon and Sixpence>, <Kettle> and <Clock> and it delivers a side or two of our every day life."

Jeon says that her work in a way is finding an answer of life in a space we meet every day and she will keep finding the spaces for as long as she can have strengthen to take up a brush. <PowerKorea>

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