By Michelle Woo
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
Inside an airy, brick-walled studio, Saelee Oh takes a moment to gaze at her corner workspace. It’s nearly bare now. Her desk and shelves have been cleared out, and most of her pieces are either tucked away into a storage unit, hanging in a local gallery or resting in the homes of collectors.
See, the Los Angeles artist recently went through some major life changes and decided that a two-month-long solo trip to Buenos Aires would do her good. After that, she’ll move to Brooklyn and from there, who knows? These are the kinds of leaps you take when you’re 26, free-spirited, and can see the world as, well, a blank canvas.
“I made a list of things I want to do before I die,” says Saelee, grabbing her notebook and skimming through the pages. “Open a boutique, build a treehouse, make a 200-foot-long painting, fly a plane. I wrote down ‘Visit one different country every year,’ but I think I’m going to bump that up to two. I’m at a period in my life where I’m hungry to do everything.”
Such are the aspirations of a girl who’s used to creating her own storybook world. Her works, which fuse mediums such as graphite, acrylic and watercolor paints, paper and thread, are thoughtfully crafted stills from her whimsical imagination. At her gallery shows from L.A. to New York to Japan, viewers are whisked away into a dreamlike oasis where dandelions sprout from books, smiling sea creatures pick flowers from the soil, kittens and horses emerge from burrowing holes, hat-wearing birds carry umbrellas, and girls nap peacefully under trees. Reality suddenly seems overrated.
“It’s an escapist thing, I guess,” Saelee says of her illusory renderings. “When I’m telling a story, that’s when I can create things from scratch.”
Her own story begins in Woodland Hills, Calif., the Los Angeles suburb where she grew up. The eldest of four girls, Saelee escaped the pressures that come with being a first-born by immersing herself in her drawings. In class, while the teacher lectured, she would doodle on her desk or in the margins of her notebook paper. “I was a daydreamer,” she recalls. “I just drew whatever was in my head.”
Saelee’s parents nurtured her talents, taking her and her sisters to a weekly art class held in the garage of a Korean woman in the neighborhood. “We got to do anything we wanted in that garage. We put on plays. We made masks. We made ornaments, dioramas, paintings. It was something I always looked forward to.”
She continued with art through high school and then enrolled in the illustration program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Her peers and teachers kept encouraging her and toward the end of college, she scored her first gallery show at the New Image Art Gallery in West Hollywood.
“I hate openings,” admits Saelee, who now averages about one show a month, mostly at L.A. galleries. “They’re excruciating. All these people are there from different parts of your life — old faces, new faces. I want to get to the point where I don’t have to be at my own shows.”
She’s on her way. Her method for success has never been shameless self-promotion (“I’m horrible at that,” she emphasizes), but rather a constant presentation of her best work, without hope or expectations, and just letting opportunities find her.
So far, it’s worked. She’s given a lecture at Harvard, launched an online gift boutique called Lemonade Maid (which features the popular “Hidden Habitats” calendar she created with San Francisco-based artist Jill Bliss) and is now working on creating animated clips. To pay the bills, she periodically illustrates for various publications.
“I never wanted to do commercial illustration,” she says. “I’d rather create something and if that work applies to somewhere, then great. I don’t really like having someone tell me what to draw.”
All Saelee really wants to do is make art, her way. The way she begins each piece varies. If she has a show planned, she might first look at the space and consider the big picture. Oftentimes, ideas are sparked by words, phrases or images from her everyday life. Nature inspires her. (“I need to be around a tree to be happy,” she says. “That’s why going to Orange County depresses me.”) She enjoys using animals as metaphors for hope, strength and independence.
“The love of animals is primitive,” describes Saelee, who grew up in a house with creatures such as dogs, cats, birds, frogs, turtles, fish, hamsters and rats. “I think they are really innocent and they’re easier to relate to than most humans because there’s less pretense and masked motives.”
One of her favorite mediums is paper. Late at night in the studio, when the rest of the world seems still, she’ll sit with an X-acto knife, cutting patterns of flowers or leaves or trees. It becomes a meditative thing, she says. In all her work, she intentionally references traditional crafts and evidence of the handmade.
“We live in a world of mass-produced items,” she says. I like the unpredictability of handmade work. I was born with kind of large hands in proportion of a girl my size. I think I was meant to work with my hands.”
While in Buenos Aires, Saelee says she hopes to get away from all the distractions at home so that she can concentrate on all the ideas she has floating around in her brain.
“Running away from it all every once is a while is a solution that works for me,” she says. “People say that running away doesn’t work but I think it can.”
The way Saelee sees it, every new adventure comes with a blank page to fill.
