CEVIGA Frahm Korean, b. 1960

Ceviga (born 1960, South Korea) is a nomadic artist who finds refuge in her own body wherever that may be and makes art to nourish her soul and keep the spirits that haunt her at bay. Like Yayoi Kusama, Ceviga moved to New York from East Asia when she was a young woman with very little financial resources and without knowing a word of English. Suffering from hallucinations that prevented her from taking any sort of public transport, Ceviga subsisted on ramen noodles and coffee for a number of years as she was forced to spend all of her money on taxis while painting with used coffee grounds. Like Kusama, Ceviga sees her work as an artist as a type of medicine, a salve to the wounds of being an Asian woman in the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy we call ‘society’ or ‘culture’. Continuing her journey around the world, she spent over a decade in Copenhagen from 1999 and then moved to London in 2017 to pursue a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Arts as a mature student. Ceviga now keeps a studio in Korea that she calls a ‘temporary camp’, suggesting a space of creative expression that she can come and go to as her ‘body house’ circumnavigates the globe. Ceviga (née Kyungok Paik and often referred to as Ceviga Frahm) is an artist name that was bestowed upon her by her late husband in an effort to brand her with a name with the same number of syllables as Damien Hirst. Coincidentally, this new moniker translates from Korean to English as ‘Ce’ – power, world; ‘Vi’ – flying, healing; ‘Ga’ – beauty, house, family, as the artistic output of Ceviga has all of these qualities with the artist herself becoming the ‘house’ or ‘powerhouse’, whose body is the vessel containing of all of this healing beauty that Ceviga gives birth to in her work.