Ever since art history emerged as an independent academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, the history of abstract art has never been free from questions of gender. The established narratives of abstraction, written by authoritative scholars, clearly distinguish between leading and supporting figures, with women artists largely relegated to the margins.

The officially recognized pioneers of abstract art—figures such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich—were all men, and the subsequent story of abstraction likewise cast male artists in the leading roles. Yet it is impossible to know how art historical narratives may be rewritten a hundred years from now.

Abstract painting has already undergone countless transformations and will continue to face new challenges. As a result, the distinction between protagonists and supporting figures will inevitably become blurred, making the history of abstraction even more compelling.

Abstraction has, in fact, been declared dead before. There were artists who proclaimed the arrival of the “last painting,” and notably, each of them presented monochromatic abstraction as painting’s ultimate conclusion. In 1921, the Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko exhibited three monochrome paintings in red, blue, and yellow, claiming them to be the logical endpoint of painting.

He announced his farewell to abstraction with the following statement: “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a discrete plane and there is to be no representation.” In the early to mid-1960s, Ad Reinhardt presented black monochrome paintings whose grid structures were barely perceptible, describing them as “absolute paintings.”

He sought a self-referential form of painting that rejected all illusion—a painting that seemed to contain no meaning beyond art itself. For a brief moment, abstract painting appeared capable of serving as the ultimate expression of modernist purity through its rejection of representation. Yet the more it pursued purity, the more it became entangled in its own contradictions.

Some artists were able to fill the canvas entirely with seemingly aimless gestures, while others expanded concepts of space and time across the surface of painting, projecting them freely as questions of dimension, unconsciousness, or identity. Psychoanalytic concerns such as the body, instinct, and the unconscious—once excluded by formalist purists—eventually returned as legitimate concerns of painting.

The influences of industrialization, popular culture, the rise of feminism, and the apparatus of spectacle were likewise absorbed into the discourse of painting. Despite repeated declarations of its demise, painting has continually reinvented itself. Even in an era in which no single movement or medium dominates the art world, painting remains both serious and free.

《Abstract Gestures from Female Painters》, organized by New Spring Project, brings together seven women abstract painters. The exhibition seeks, first and foremost, to understand the value of abstract painting as the capacity to convey visual beauty and emotional resonance through the free arrangement of formal elements.

At the same time, by featuring exclusively women artists, it highlights the distinctive qualities of abstraction shaped by their sensibilities and artistic attitudes. To this end, the gallery has selected works ranging from those of Wook-kyung Choi (1940–1985), who established a singular artistic vision through a bold and powerful visual language, to those of mid-career and younger artists who continue to develop their own distinctive abstract gestures.

Although the participating artists span more than half a century—from the 1960s and 1970s to the present day in 2024—and some of the works are separated by more than sixty years, the free yet resolute gestures embodied in them remain equally vivid and compelling.

Among the participating artists, Wook-kyung Choi serves as a central figure in the exhibition as one of Korea’s first-generation women abstract painters. She left for the United States in 1963 and remained there for fifteen years until 1978, working during a period when the center of the Western art world had decisively shifted from Europe to the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Beginning in earnest during her years abroad, Choi pursued abstraction across a wide range of media, including drawing, collage, painting, and ceramics, while absorbing influences from Abstract Expressionism and the Neo-Avant-Garde. At the same time, American society was marked by anti-war movements, civil rights activism, and the emergence of first-generation feminist artists and educators such as Judy Chicago.

Witnessing and experiencing these developments firsthand, Choi gradually developed a strong sense of self-awareness as a woman artist. Her understanding of artistic identity rejected rigid binary distinctions between men and women, instead emphasizing the importance of work grounded in personal experience and individual character. This perspective can be clearly seen in her own writings from the period.

“As a woman and a painter, my experiences have become the source of my creativity. My work reflects both past and present experiences. Each piece represents growth in my life and an attempt to express my emotions through a visual language. Although my works are rooted in my own life, I do not seek merely to tell stories through them. Rather, I strive to express the moments I have lived through visually. I hope that those who encounter my work will share these experiences, communicate through them, and find empathy within them.”

Wook-kyung Choi articulated a firm artistic philosophy in which painting served as a visual language for expressing autobiographical experiences and personal emotions, extending beyond a specifically female subjectivity. While she occasionally addressed major social issues of late-1960s America, such as the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, her drawings often offered a more intimate mode of expression.

In these works, she incorporated words, phrases, and sentences that conveyed her thoughts both directly and indirectly. By working not only with pencil and charcoal but also with ink and brush, she revealed a distinctly East Asian cultural identity rooted in calligraphic traditions. Her collages suggest the influence of Pop Art and Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine paintings, while her paintings are characterized not only by free and expressive brushwork but also by the bold use of vivid primary colors.

Although deeply engaged with the artistic developments of contemporary American art and experimental approaches to media, she succeeded in establishing a distinctive visual language of her own. The critical reception of Choi’s work during her lifetime, however, often confined its significance to the personal sphere or projected stereotypical views of women artists onto her practice.

In fact, the task of establishing the place of women artists within art history remains an ongoing challenge even today. In 2021, the Centre Pompidou presented 《Women in Abstraction》, an exhibition featuring the work of more than one hundred women artists working in abstraction, including three works by Wook-kyung Choi.

The exhibition sought to firmly establish the contributions of women artists to the history of abstraction, while simultaneously revealing how deeply entrenched male-centered narratives of art history remain even in the twenty-first century. If this is the case within Western art history, the situation in Korea is no different. Within the history of Korean abstract art, women artists have often been marginalized within male-dominated genealogies or discussed only in isolation, and this remains an unresolved issue.

In this exhibition, NewSpringProject brings together works by Wook-kyung Choi alongside those of Je Yeoran (b. 1960), Yun-Hee Toh (b. 1961), Hyungji Park (b. 1977), Koo Jiyoon (b. 1982), Meeyoung Kim (b. 1984), and Keem Jiyoung (b. 1987), all of whom have developed distinctive abstract gestures and sustained active practices.

By presenting artists from multiple generations in a single exhibition, the gallery offers an opportunity to survey the visual explorations of women artists across a broad historical span. Je Yeoran and Yun-Hee Toh are exemplary mid-career artists who have dedicated more than four decades to abstract painting, while Hyungji Park, Koo Jiyoon, Meeyoung Kim, and Keem Jiyoung have each steadily built their own artistic practices over the past ten to twenty years.

Now that these artists—each pursuing their own experiments and achievements from different positions—have been brought together in one space, we are able to observe not only the family resemblances shared among contemporary women abstract painters but also their individual distinctiveness.

While the characteristics and significance of their artistic practices cannot be fully explained within a few sentences or paragraphs, it is important to recognize that each work on view reflects both the artist’s fundamental understanding of painting and the concerns that continue to shape their practice today. With this in mind, the following discussion offers an overview of the participating artists and their work.

For the past four decades, Je Yeoran has pursued a body of paintings under the title Usquam Nusquam. Originating from an exploration of the pictorial surface, her paintings are created by pushing and pulling paint across a horizontally placed canvas using a squeegee. Having first become deeply engaged with printmaking early in her career, Je was already familiar with the squeegee as a tool.

Unlike a brush, it functions as an instrument of resistance that cannot be fully controlled by the artist’s body. Yet it is precisely this quality that continuously generates accidental elements on the surface, compelling the artist to confront forces beyond her control. Through the repetition of this process, her paintings gradually take shape.

Je’s paintings overwhelm the viewer with their intense colors and rich materiality, creating what has been described as “the feeling of standing in a place detached from reality, when one senses that somewhere within the canvas rough, circling curves and abrupt halts continue to unfold.” They also “give concrete form to spatial relationships and chromatic boundaries through agile emotional responses, while constructing rhythm, composition, structure, and form through the interaction of color boundaries and masses of paint.”

The artist has remarked that “only the vertical direction possesses an active and spiritual meaning. In the human body, the spine is like an inward-facing vertical line.” In nature, verticality signifies gravity and weight. Her paintings confront gravity as matter itself, resisting friction as they build forms and push color upward. The force that drives these passionate surfaces is ultimately a force of active and spiritual resistance against gravity—a persistent assertion of the vertical.

Yun-Hee Toh has stated that “my work is about discovering the beauty hidden behind phenomena.” Her practice has therefore focused on things that are invisible yet still perceptible through human sensation. The beauty she speaks of carries ethical implications concerning coexistence among human beings, objects, nature, and the relationships that connect them.

Her earlier works were characterized by delicate linear drawing and paint drips, while her recent paintings reveal a contemplative engagement with worlds shaped by light and darkness. In these newer works, she has abandoned the pencil and brush that once served as her primary tools and instead applies color directly with her hands.

Toh has likened painting to the idea that spirit creates matter, explaining that her abstract works are not paintings conceived intellectually and then executed, but rather paintings that emerge through response. To make such responses possible, she believes that cultivating and disciplining oneself is essential. As a result, the beauty she seeks behind visible phenomena cannot be separated from an ethical dimension.

At the same time, her paintings are sensuous surfaces in which bodily traces and accumulated energies are embedded. The vigorous movements and force of the artist’s hands, visible throughout the canvas, make the colors and textures of paint feel almost tactile, generating synesthetic illusions within the viewer’s visual perception. Her gestures function as both a bodily act and a painterly language through which the invisible becomes sensorially perceptible.

Hyungji Park understands her paintings as the accumulated result of countless events generated through repeated acts of choice and decision-making. These painterly decisions occur in a chain of interconnected actions, and the failures, mistakes, and disruptions that arise throughout the process are not regarded as unproductive losses of time.

Rather, they function as the driving force of the work and contribute to its richness. Park transforms images captured from seemingly trivial moments of everyday life into painterly gestures. As she repeatedly layers, damages, erases, covers, and repaints, her canvases develop irregular and homely surfaces.

She seeks to transform light and ephemeral subject matter into paintings with a long temporal resonance, placing greater emphasis on the process of painting than on the intrinsic weight or significance of the subject itself. The everyday incidents that interest Park encompass a wide range of experiences: personal events occurring around her, images encountered online, changes in the weather, and stories heard on radio programs.

Among these, she is particularly drawn to things that are fleeting, volatile, and easily overlooked. Notes pinned to the walls of her studio record ideas that she thought might be interesting to paint at a particular moment; some of these notes have remained there for years before eventually finding their way into a painting.

Koo Jiyoon has long explored, through painting, the hidden desires and anxieties experienced by individuals within urban spaces shaped by continual cycles of construction and demolition. More recently, her attention has shifted toward the overgrown trees that have risen to the height of skyscrapers and the ecosystems that have formed beneath them.

Fascinated by the diverse modes of coexistence found within these environments, she has developed a body of work centered on these observations. Within landscapes shaped and controlled by human intervention, ecosystems persist through adaptation, embodying wildness, inclusivity, and at times even more uncanny forms of existence.

The artist captures these ambivalent and strange qualities as metaphors for the city, expressing them through juxtapositions and contrasts of gray tones across the pictorial surface. The drawings that precede her paintings function as intimate and personal records.

They help the artist interpret the discrepancies that arise when translating the invisible into visual images, as well as the uncertainty that accompanies each brushstroke during the painting process. In doing so, these drawings guide her toward a more daring and liberated mode of painting.

Meeyoung Kim is best known for her all-over paintings distinguished by their uniquely moist and fluid textures. She often creates dynamic movement across the surface by rapidly layering paint, applying new pigments before previous layers have dried.

By manipulating the viscosity of paint, the thickness and stroke of her brushes, and even the orientation of the canvas, she transforms the pictorial surface into a site where countless painterly events unfold. Her 'Snow Ball' series translates into painting the phenomenon of a snowball rolling downhill and growing larger as it accelerates under the force of gravity.

Yet rather than focusing on the formation of the snowball itself, the artist is primarily concerned with the physical movement of her own brushwork. Like a snowball in motion, her brushstrokes repeatedly trace circular trajectories, moving in ways that emphasize shifting centers of weight and force. As a result, her paintings simultaneously construct a powerful sense of movement and temporality across the canvas.

The subjects of Keem Jiyoung’s paintings are formless entities: light, temperature, the sun, candlelight, and traces of trauma. Within the history of Western art, abstract painting has often been associated with attempts to overcome postwar trauma by bracketing historical realities, distancing itself from them, and pursuing a condition of purity through abstraction.

Keem’s abstract paintings likewise confront the wounds of tragedy through the light and warmth of candle flames. Whether slowly emerging at the edge of a flame or burning intensely at its center, tragic memories and experiences of pain are represented through the visual language of light and temperature on the canvas.

The indefinable forms of light and warmth take shape through the artist’s quiet accumulation of temporal layers embedded within light itself. At times, her canvases seem to contemplate the faintly flickering edges of illumination; at others, they evoke a point suspended between life and death through resolute and solid fields of color.

Yet her approach to abstraction appears distant from notions of the sublime or the void. The temperature of her paintings tends toward warmth rather than coldness, suggesting that her psychological engagement with trauma is oriented not toward despair but toward a quiet wish for healing and well-being in the aftermath of suffering.

The practices of all the artists discussed above are not static but directed toward ongoing inquiry and the possibility of transformation within painting. They willingly embrace the idea that painting, as a lifelong vocation, is a medium fated to continually negate and renew itself. Even when it seems that nothing new remains to be painted, painting is constantly reinvented through its own internal processes.

There is no such thing as a final painting. The great paintings recorded in art history are precedents that sustained discourse on painting precisely by undertaking the paradox of negating themselves. Art history, likewise, must continually question and renew itself. This is both its destiny and its essence—and the very force that has driven this exhibition.

References

• 《Abstract Gestures from Female Painters》