She left South Korea the same year to take up her studies at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin, in 2001, as a member of the class of famous painter Georg Baselitz.
In 2002, while she was still attending her basic course, the South Korean embassy commissioned SEO to design the United Buddy Bear on behalf of her native country.
Together with the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, she unveiled this Buddy Bear at the exhibition opening to launch this international art event.
The reaction to everyday issues in life and politics, as well as in art and culture, led to statements about these subjects based on an aesthetic concept, which also embodies a definition of the picture as a moment taken out of the unlimited context of the eternal stream of images in the mind, pinpointing not objects, but the essence of things.
In the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Rostock, "close encounter – robert rauschenberg – seo" in 2008 she showed a very large size painting with a lake and waterlilies and mountains in the background.
She treats and quotes Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Caspar David Friedrich und Carl Spitzweg, and the sculptural works accompanying the paintings are cast in "German silver" (i. e. nickel silver, Argantan, alpacca) and show what for her is essentially German: beer barrels (Gemütlichkeit), garden gnomes (contemplativeness), stags’ antlers (power) and – cows.
In an exhibition, "Personal Structures" at Palazzo Bembo, within the framework of the 2011 Venice Biennale,[9] SEO showed an installation of four of her concentric abstract "Energy" paintings in a dialogue with a box lit from the bottom with assorted rock crystals (German diamonds).