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“Seo Nang” Series
In Korean folk belief, a Seo Nang tree is an ordinary tree that, through shared faith, becomes the seat of a village guardian spirit. Nature is thus redefined as sacred, and matter is elevated to the status of deity. Drawing on his childhood memory of encountering such a tree deep in the mountains, Jo Joowon investigates the uneasy territory between the visible and the invisible, knowledge and unknowing, object and value.

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His Seo Nang sculptures and images manifest along two main lines. In gallery spaces he assembles cast-off, contemporary objects—plastic shards, industrial scraps, fragments of daily life—into totem-like structures that echo the original guardian trees. In parallel, he models virtual 3-D objects that migrate from the screen to the real world as printed images or projected holograms. Each fragment, whether physical debris or digital polygon, functions like a stone added to a cairn: a trace of a wish, a tool of quiet incantation, evidence that even the most mundane substance can be reborn as an amulet.

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By placing on a single two-dimensional plane the countless silhouettes an object reveals when viewed from different angles, the artist reflects on the polysemy of existence—the idea that no thing can be confined to a single image, just as no belief can be locked into a single definition. The series becomes a search for a personal faith unbound by socially prescribed hierarchies of value, and simultaneously an invitation for viewers to test that possibility for themselves.

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The work ultimately poses a simple yet pressing question: What turns a heap of discarded things into a “sacred tree” today? In other words, how might individual belief reclaim and re-enchant a world that increasingly treats materials, objects, and even people as interchangeable and disposable?