Weserhalle
is pleased to present 《Following the
Curves》, the debut solo exhibition in Germany by Korean
artist Jiwon Choi. Known for her evocative paintings that tread the delicate
line between stillness and surrealism, Choi builds a world where porcelain
dolls, ornamental foliage, and domestic relics reside in a suspended
state—between memory and awakening, life and afterlife.
With
a practice rooted in the fusion of still life, landscape, and portraiture, Choi
captures the theatricality of the everyday. Drawing from the language of
decorative arts and ancestral nostalgia, her subjects are porcelain figures
that quietly echo past lives. Once discarded or overlooked, they now appear
quietly awakened—tenderly poised behind swaying orchids and slender blades of
grass, engaged in private rituals within painted sanctuaries.
The
works in this series reflect Choi’s ongoing dialogue with absence and presence.
Each piece is a chamber of convergence: natural and artificial, intimate and
uncanny. Echoing the reflective surface of memory, her canvases shimmer with a
peculiar contradiction—what appears glossy is matte; what looks still, brims
with the possibility of movement. Like the fading tick of a chiming clock in
her grandmother’s home, time in Choi’s universe is elastic and cyclical.
The
orchid becomes a recurring protagonist in this exhibition. Blooming and wilting
within the confines of Choi’s studio, its tender curves and chromatic gradients
are translated into compositional devices. Slender stems frame the doll-like
figures, often partially obscuring them, enhancing a sense of gentle
distance—as if the viewer is quietly intruding upon an intimate moment. These
images are not merely aesthetic compositions but diaristic entries—visual
notations of longing, solitude, and resilience.
Choi
refers to her work as a space for “beauty, healing, sadness, and emptiness,”
and this emotional ambiguity is tangible throughout the exhibition. Her figures
are not just objects of the gaze, but vessels of personal and collective
memory—expressing a layered tenderness that merges loss with grace. In these
paintings, beauty is not ornamental but contemplative; charm lies in
eccentricity and quiet tension. The delicate strangeness of her compositions
lingers—like a half-remembered dream.
Through
her background in Western painting, with BFA and MFA degrees from Ewha Womans
University, Choi has developed a painterly language that renders the inanimate
with sentient vitality. Her brushwork—at once controlled and spontaneous—plays
with perception, occasionally tricking the eye into believing these images are
three-dimensional reliefs or sculptural forms. Upon closer look, the gaze of
each figure reveals something more: an emotion barely withheld, a story
half-told.
The
exhibition offers a glimpse into the artist’s evolving visual diary—a garden of
ambiguous beauty and quiet epiphanies. It is a space where nostalgia germinates
and future selves begin to take shape, framed by shadowed leaves and the glint
of porcelain skin.
