Cancer survivor who began painting full-time after brush with death has first solo exhibition in Hong Kong
- When Seema Mathew overcame breast cancer for the second time in 2012, she finally embraced her lifelong dream of being a painter, and has not looked back since
- The paintings in her first solo exhibition are deeply personal and reflect her relationship with her own body after a long battle against cancer, she says
Art used to be a hobby for Bangalore, India-born Seema Mathew. As a child, she was always drawing. After moving to Hong Kong in 2000, she attended weekend art classes and painted in her spare time when she wasn’t working. Everything changed in 2012 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, for the second time.
Her first brush with cancer was in 2004, but that experience did not make her question her life choices in quite the same way. The former travel agent got better and started a business selling art supplies.
The second bout was more painful, terrifying and traumatic. The close call with death led her to shut her business and embrace her lifelong dream of painting full-time.
“I have always felt like the universe was trying to push me in this direction, I just never really listened. I know now that painting is what I was truly born to do,” she says ahead of her first solo exhibition that opens this weekend.
“Origa-me”, the show’s title, is also the name of one of the paintings. It depicts a torso, made up of fragments painted black and white that resemble an aerial landscape cut into pieces and rearranged haphazardly and whose form has been manipulated and reshaped as if it were a product of origami – Japanese paper folding. A small blood-red square stands out from the background, a reference to East Asian artists’ name seals.
“The idea for Origa-me was born out of my real-life experience of undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries in 2012,” Mathew explains. “After such extensive procedures, I viewed my body as a cut-and-paste version of its former self, like an origami.”
