Jiwon Choi, The year of the Rabbit's Room, 2023, Oil on canvas, 162.2x130.3cm © Jiwon Choi

The porcelain doll’s skin, polished to the point of reflecting light, stands beside a glossy blue rabbit-shaped craft object. Together, they evoke not only a sense of visual smoothness but also the tactile sensation of hardness and coolness. Their dazzling, solid exterior belies an interior that is hollow and fragile. For Jiwon Choi, porcelain dolls embody the contemporary sensibility of living with an undercurrent of anxiety beneath a beautiful surface. This interplay of opposing qualities—external brilliance and inner fragility—forms a key to understanding Choi's artistic world. If porcelain dolls symbolize the sleek desires and uneasy emotions of modern life, what might reside within their rooms?

Jiwon Choi, The Paused Moment, 2023, Oil on canvas, 162.1x227.3cm © Jiwon Choi

One can glimpse the answer in The Paused Moment(2023). In a dimly lit room with blinds drawn to block out light, a red deer, a fish, and an old cuckoo clock quietly occupy the space. A modern clock, depicted entirely in white, shows a time that does not correspond with the cuckoo clock. Between the frozen moments of these two clocks, dolls and craft objects find themselves trapped.

Installation view ©PSBF

This exhibition also presents Choi's new work, Ready, Set, Go!(2024), where the small objects placed beside the dolls take center stage. True to its dynamic title, the painting captures vigorous movements—fluttering wings poised for flight, swaying fins, and windswept horse manes. Yet, these motions remain confined within crafted forms, and the fallen old trees and rooted buildings that appear between these movements seem to remind us of perpetual stillness.

The expression of vitality within the temporal boundary of the present moment becomes fixed and taxidermized through painting. At the same time, the artist moves her brush as if breathing life into these still objects. For Choi, still-life painting is, in her words, “a practice situated between life and death.”

This exploration of the threshold between life and death extends to her ‘in the Frame’ series, which features butterflies and orchids enclosed in finely polished wooden frames or taxidermized butterflies within old, paint-stripped wooden frames. The variability of life is captured in these paused moments of painting, becoming fixed and immutable. Jiwon Choi translates this paradoxical boundary into her own sculptural language.

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