Biography

Born in Malaysia and based in London, James Seow works across photography, printmaking and sculpture, examining the relationship between nature, memory and cultural identity. His practice considers cultivated landscapes as spaces where ecology, migration and inheritance converge, revealing how places are shaped by human intervention and inherited ways of seeing.

Drawing on East Asian and Western traditions, Seow works with subjects including bonsai, gardens and constructed landscapes as metaphors for care, control and belonging. These settings hold a tension between growth and containment, where ideas of nature, beauty and identity are continually negotiated.

Across intaglio printmaking, immersive sculpture and digitally constructed photography, Seow combines observation with imagination. His works are often assembled from fragments of lived environments, creating places that feel both familiar and imagined. Through these constructed landscapes, he considers how memory, displacement and ecological change shape our sense of place.

At the heart of his practice is an interest in cultivation as both an act of care and an attempt to shape the living world. His work reflects on what is preserved, what is transformed and what ultimately resists our attempts to control it.