Minyoung Choi (b. 1989) paints scenes that exist between reality and unreality. Filled with imaginative energy, her paintings embody the artist’s personal experiences and the unconscious world that emerges from them. Heterogeneous elements—such as past and present, nature and artificial objects, reality and dreams—are edited into multilayered structures that transcend time and space within her canvases, where they are rendered in her distinctive light and color to form an unfamiliar harmony.

Minyoung Choi’s painting begins with fragments of memory drawn from her childhood and experiences of migration. By depicting herself and her surroundings that had isolated in an unfulfilled relationship in her hazy moment of unconsciousness, as an everyday life in which mysterious creatures coexist, she builds up her own fictional narrative that experiences an escape from a peaceful yet tedious life.

As in the Dépaysement technique, countless images drawn from the artist’s experiences and psychological emotion are combined with a provocative imagination to break down the boundaries of reality. She creates her own fantasy in which the familiar and the strange overlap in a paradoxical way, arbitrarily borrowing from Eastern and Western myths, fables and common oral stories.
 
Memories and imagination are intertwined with a sense of anxiety and chaos, leading to an ephemeral inner landscape, where space and place, human and animal, city and nature merge to form a new world.

In the 2022 two-person exhibition 《Curtain Call》 at ThisWeekendRoom, Minyoung Choi unfolded her imagination within the enclosure of night and dreams. The images—ones that seem to exist in a liminal zone between the real and the imaginary—often originate from scenes she has envisioned in her mind or from inspirations encountered in unfamiliar environments.
 
For instance, the beings she named “Slightly Frightened Creatures” first appeared in one of her dreams as unknown life forms. They later became central protagonists in the scenarios she actively stages within her paintings.

These Star-shaped creatures ascend and descend stairways or wander through places once inhabited by people, redrawing the artist’s fading dreams. Masked figures and wild animals that appear beneath the moonlight recompose the textures of nature she encountered while staying in unfamiliar regions into dreamlike landscapes.
 
Various unknown entities—impossible to exist in reality—are freely born within Minyoung Choi’s paintings, forming strange harmonies and continuously generating surreal scenes.

The animals that consistently appear in Minyoung Choi’s paintings—fish, cats, snails, turtles—are not mere motifs, but companions that share emotions with humans and drift between memory and imagination. Within her works, these living beings move as fragments of memory and embodiments of the unconscious, closely tied to her childhood in Eoeun-dong (魚隱洞; literally meaning “the village where fish hide”), where she grew up.

Moreover, this unfamiliarity in her works symbolizes an understanding and acceptance of relationships and a balance between the inner mind and the outer environment through the interplay of darkness and light, the contrast of complementary colors or the flat spatial composition that blurs the boundary between inside and outside.
 
Curator Lee Jangwook once described Minyoung Choi’s pictorial world as resembling “a world where strange things happen yet feel natural,” much like a dream. Her paintings are not the result of spontaneously erupting surreal techniques, but rather landscapes formed through the condensation of emotions and memories accumulated over time.
 
For this reason, the unreal scenes within her work do not appear as worlds detached from reality; instead, they approach us as another kind of reality. The narratives unfold not in a conventional chronological order, but according to the flow of the artist’s emotions.

In her 2024 solo exhibition 《Dreams for Hire》 at Space K, Minyoung Choi presented a constellation of imagined images tied to places imbued with her emotions and memories—from Eoeun-dong in Daejeon, where she grew up, to Fish Island in London, where her current studio is located.
 
Images originating from memories long settled in the depths of her mind reemerge within the canvas as dreamlike scenes. Dolphins surface in the Han River at sunset; a penguin appears beside someone sleeping in a living room; a midnight rainbow glows like a lunar halo. Elements that could never coexist within a single frame intermingle, giving rise to entirely new landscapes.

The ‘Han River’ series, painted while recalling her memories of Korea, consists of unfamiliar scenes in which dolphins appear beyond people enjoying outings along the river. Motifed after the Amazon river dolphin, these creatures swim freely through the Han River—far from their native habitat of the Amazon—in works such as Bridges (2024), City Life (2024), and Han River Water Play (2024).
 
In Night Swimming (2024), the river dolphin finally emerges into the sea, rising beneath the moonlight with a body as immense as a whale. The surrounding figures, seemingly accustomed to the surreal scale of the animal, continue their daily routines and appear as observers who gaze at the creature with quiet familiarity.

Minyoung Choi deepens the sense of space within her heterogeneous compositions through the use of light and color. By infusing specific times of day and atmospheric conditions into her paintings, she intensifies the distinct mood of each work.
 
For instance, in Sun Moon Tea (2024), she depicts a surreal scene in which day and night coexist, contrasting bright sunlight with the calm glow of moonlight. Although the two figures sit facing each other at close range while drinking tea, one is placed in the sunlit area and the other in shadow, creating the visual illusion that they inhabit separate worlds.
 
In another work, Bedroom (2023), the contrast between light and shadow cast by window blinds becomes especially pronounced. The striped light that fills the room unifies the elements within the frame, transforming the interior into a mysterious scene reminiscent of a dream.

Furthermore, Minyoung Choi naturally connects interior and exterior spaces, blurring the boundary between reality and imagination. In Accidental Dream (2024), a figure walking along a snowy path at midnight with a dog gazes at a house that has suddenly appeared before them. The house is revealed in cross-section, its interior fully visible like a stage set.
 
This abrupt cutaway view draws the viewer into a realm of uncertainty—suggesting that the house might be a projection of the figure’s imagination, or perhaps a landscape existing in a parallel universe.
 
In Unknown (2024), a cliff of a snow-covered mountain—an untamed wilderness—connects directly to the interior space where a figure lies asleep at a desk. The scene may be perceived as a landscape unfolding beyond a window, or as the dreamscape of the sleeping figure. In this way, spaces that traverse inside and outside expand the perceptual range within which the viewer can imagine.

Animals in her work also appear as symbolic elements born from the fusion of the unconscious and imagination. For example, the lion-dance mask—drawn from the tradition of Korean folk mask dance (talchum)—that repeatedly appears in Moonbow (2024) and Visitors (2024) derives from memories of the artist’s school days, lingering in her unconscious and later emerging as a motif. The “lion,” originally imagined by ancestors who had never seen a real one, is transformed through Choi’s imagination into a new living being rather than a mere puppet.
 
In addition, animals that rarely catch the human eye—such as lynxes, eels, and octopuses—also appear. Within her paintings, these creatures function as intermediary beings, witnessing what humans cannot see and at times encroaching upon or sharing human domains of life, thereby traversing the boundary between reality and the surreal.

Meanwhile, the final gallery space—unfolding against the backdrop of a full moon—was connected to the artist’s interest in myth, folklore, legend, and the systems of belief and ritual practiced by humans. Among the works presented, Moon Ritual (2024) was inspired by the folktale of the moon rabbit and by Confucian ancestral rites.
 
As a child, the artist was fascinated by the sight of small animals eating the food left behind for ancestors after memorial rites at family graves. The painting captures such moments in which ritual does not proceed in solemnity alone. What resembles a child’s playful rolling of snowballs transforms into a serious ceremony, while digital pixel-like characters—seemingly emerging from another dimension—intervene to shift the atmosphere and provoke curiosity.

Furthermore, her 2025 solo exhibition 《Midnight Walk》 at Gallery Baton traced Minyoung Choi’s journey of gradually expanding her own worldview, guided by narratives drawn from the deepest layers of her inner self.
 
Starting with figurative expressions that combine everyday memory with fragments of dreams, it proceeds to a deeper level of personal experience and inner consciousness, arriving at a unique aesthetic that breaks down the boundaries of perception and imagination.
 
The exhibition formed a multilayered narrative through a combination of new and recent works set in unknown places and times. The use of blue and green as main colors creates the supernatural mood of a new time and space, while the curious movements of creatures above and below the water’s surface evoke a powerful visual impression.

An example of this is Sleepless Nights (2025), where a large pair of twin cats appears alongside an owl, a crab, and fish in a misty forest scene at the dead of night. The animals’ gaze is directed outside the canvas as they confront the viewer, eliciting the tense feeling that they might approach at any moment. The deep blue air reflecting the moonlight suggests that the scene’s setting may be underwater, while the clear forms create a complex form of mythology as they allude to the dual nature of being.
 
Moreover, the various light sources in Minyoung Choi’s work—moonlight, sunset, artificial illumination—function as crucial elements that shape not only the composition of her paintings but also the rhythm of viewing. For instance, in Dear Storm (2025), a gentle glow envelops young fish in a pond and a snowman-like figure, capturing a fleeting moment of communion with living beings.

In this way, Minyoung Choi evokes different sensory layers as she forms a mysterious narrative on the boundary where reality intersects with unreality, space with time, and consciousness with the unconscious. Within these scenes, the coexistence of heterogeneous elements leads viewers along a journey of emotions that feel at once unfamiliar and intimate, guiding them to drift through inner memories and imagined realms.

 ”In my work, multiple layers of worlds overlap. They may seem strange yet beautiful, unnatural yet harmonious—and I believe this reflects the very texture of our lives.”   (Minyoung Choi, from an interview with Gallery Baton) 

Minyoung Choi earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in painting from Seoul National University and a master’s degree from Slade School of Fine Art. Currently, she lives and works in London, UK. Her solo exhibitions include 《Midnight Walk》 (Gallery Baton, Seoul, 2025), 《Dreams for Hire》 (Space K, Seoul, 2024), and 《Dark Brightness》 (Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2023).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Nakseonjae Yu, The Harmony of Connection》 (Changdeokgung Palace, Seoul, 2025), 《The Painted Room》 (GRIMM, Amsterdam, 2023), 《Romancing Dissent》 (Sixi Museum, Nanjing, China, 2023), 《Unseen》 (Daejeon Creative Center, Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, 2023), and 《Curtain Call》 (ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, 2022).
 
Choi was awarded the Next Generation Art Prize at the 2018 Wells Art Contemporary Award and was selected for residencies at the Slade Summer School and the Olvera Contemporary Art Centre in 2017.

References

• 최민영, Minyoung Choi (Artist Website)
• 갤러리바톤, 최민영 (Gallery Baton, Minyoung Choi)
• 디스위켄드룸, [서문] 커튼콜 (ThisWeekendRoom, [Preface] Curtain Call)
• 스페이스K, [서문] 꿈을 빌려드립니다 (Space K, [Preface] Dreams for Hire)
• Arte, 이장욱 - 최민영의 그림엔 윌리엄 터너·제임스 터렐·올라퍼 엘리아슨이 보인다
• 갤러리바톤, [서문] Midnight Walk (Gallery Baton, [Preface] Midnight Walk)
• 갤러리바톤, [인터뷰] 최민영 - Midnight Walk (Gallery Baton, [Interview] Minyoung Choi - Midnight Walk)