As a three-time member of the LEGO Ideas 10K club with some of the most stunning modular buildings we’ve ever seen, Jiwoo Seon has become something of a celebrity in the LEGO community. But those past works didn’t prepare us for her latest masterpiece: a gallery-ready floral artwork built for the (now-concluded) Create Your Own Exhibition contest. Overture of Blossoms: Journey to Freedom is the builder’s most personal work to date.
Jiwoo takes advantage of a wide array of colors and parts to create both literal flowers that burst from the brick canvas and abstract expressions of life. This is such a rewarding work to pour over and revisit; the more you look, the more surprising details and superb parts usage you’ll see. I’m especially moved by the rainbow of bars below the flowers. Are they the fragile stems that hold this explosion of blooms up? Or are they drips of color from a bouquet so bursting with life?
From Jiwoo’s artist’s statement:
This work represents my life’s journey in a different color with the light of flowers.
Yellow represents the energy of the sun, Red represents the combination of light and space, Blue represents the inner side, and White represents space and time gone by. The colors harmonize with each other to express that my steps in the past become nutrients.
Beautiful! I definitely see the bottom lines of colour as running paint rather than stems, since some of the lines don’t reach the bottom of the canvas. Either way, the overall impression is vibrant and lovely.
They can be either stems or running paint – if not pipes whose purpose can be anything one would be prone to think about in the context.
The build is intricate, with lots of sections which catch the eye. It is also riddled with parts meant only to fill spaces – while hopefully suggesting fullness and abundance (the kind you find in an old, lonely woman’s house and which you probably throw away once the owner is dead and the place is sold).
It must have taken some time to put together!