Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Choi Soo Jung has presented solo exhibitions at Insa Art Space (2007), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2010), Gallery Skape (2012), BOAN1942 (2019), and Sejong Museum of Art (2024).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Choi Soo Jung has participated in major group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2015, 2024), Seoul Museum of Art (2018, 2024), Seoul National University Museum of Art (2019, 2020), Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2014), and Gwangju Museum of Art (2014).

Awards (Selected)

Choi Soo Jung was awarded the 11th Chongkundang Yesuljisang (2022) and the MFA Now 2008 Painting Competition (2008).

Residencies (Selected)

Choi Soo Jung participated in residency programs including the Insa Art Space Artist Project (2005), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2009), SeMA Nanji Residency (2014), and MMCA Goyang Residency (2015).

Collections (Selected)

Works by Choi Soo Jung are held in the collections of the Government Art Bank, MMCA Art Bank, Seoul National University Museum of Art, Moran Museum of Art, and KD Collection, Hong Kong.

Originality & Identity

Choi Soo Jung’s practice explores liminal states where reality and fiction, order and chaos, familiarity and estrangement intersect. Drawing upon objects encountered in everyday life, fragments of memory, and symbolic imagery, she constructs worlds that resist reduction to fixed meanings.

What matters in her work is not the narrative of an individual image, but the relationships and tensions that emerge through the encounter of disparate elements. Rather than leading viewers toward a single storyline, these networks of relations invite them into sensory situations in which multiple possibilities coexist simultaneously.

For many years, Choi has reflected on the question of distance between human beings and the world through concepts such as Mugan (無間), Gonggan (空間), and Hyeongan (玄間). Excessive intimacy can lead to sameness and repetition, while excessive distance can result in disconnection and alienation.

Choi focuses on the subtle interval formed between these two extremes, visualizing moments in which relationships emerge and perception becomes activated. In her work, space functions not merely as a backdrop but as a site of events where different beings and images encounter one another.

Recurring motifs such as clowns, masks, ruins, flames, minerals, and old postcards reveal processes of transformation and becoming. Among them, masks and clowns appear as symbols of metamorphosis, continuously shifting into other identities rather than remaining fixed.

These figures evoke questions of otherness and multiple selves that have long occupied the artist’s attention, extending her inquiry beyond an anthropocentric worldview toward a broader interest in worlds where diverse forms of existence coexist.

For Choi Soo Jung, art is an exploration of the processes through which different sensations, memories, and images collide and connect. The stages and masks, light and sound, and fragmented images that repeatedly appear throughout her work continually dismantle and reconfigure existing orders, placing viewers within situations where new relationships and meanings emerge.

Through these event-like structures, Choi persistently investigates the intervals that exist between beings and the possibilities of connection that arise across them.

Style & Contents

Choi Soo Jung has expanded the physical scope of her practice by combining painting with installation, sound, objects, and text. In her work, painting does not exist as an autonomous flat surface but operates in relation to the exhibition space as a whole.

The paintings installed throughout the gallery are combined with objects, sound, and lighting to construct a unified scene, through which viewers move and experience the work. This approach extends the act of viewing painting into a spatial and embodied experience.

Within the picture plane, Choi frequently juxtaposes disparate images and symbols. Heterogeneous elements such as minerals, flames, animals, clowns, ruins, and old postcards coexist within a single composition without being subordinated to a fixed narrative, generating distinctive tensions and associations.

Lines and trajectories traversing the surface, together with recurring circular structures, connect individual elements while maintaining the image in a dynamic and fluid state.

Material experimentation and handcrafted processes are also central to her practice. In addition to paint, Choi incorporates thread, embroidery, and various materials into the surface, actively foregrounding the materiality of painting.

The traces of thread that appear to proliferate across the canvas in particular blur the boundary between image and matter, creating additional layers within the work. Moving between two- and three-dimensionality, image and object, these elements heighten the sensory density of the composition.

In recent works, the tendency to construct the entire exhibition space as a stage has become increasingly pronounced. Light, sound, and installation elements are closely integrated with painting, encouraging viewers to participate directly in the situations created by the work.

As images within the paintings overlap with the physical space of the exhibition, the work expands beyond a purely visual object into an event where perception and sensory experience intersect.

Topography & Continuity

Choi Soo Jung has understood painting not as an autonomous image but as a site where disparate elements enter into relationships from the very beginning of her practice. By juxtaposing images gathered from everyday life, fragments of memory, and symbolic signs within the picture plane, she has remained attentive to the narratives that emerge through chance encounters and collisions.

This approach has persisted from early works such as 《Parallel World》 and 《Future of the Present in the Past》 to her recent practice, forming a fundamental basis of her artistic world.

While the formal scope of her work has expanded from painting to installation, sound, objects, and embroidery, her interest in worlds where different beings and images coexist has remained consistent.

Recurring motifs such as minerals, clowns, masks, flames, and old postcards have been continually reinterpreted through different forms over time, functioning as devices through which she explores generation and disappearance, movement and transformation, and the boundaries between reality and fiction.

Choi repeatedly invokes the structures of the stage and the event. Her exhibitions are conceived not as spaces that convey a predetermined narrative but as sites where different sensations and meanings intersect. Within these environments, viewers occupy the dual position of observer and participant.

Moving across the boundaries between pictorial space and physical space, these structures continually reconfigure the relationship between the artwork and its audience.

While exploring the possibilities of change and becoming, Choi Soo Jung has consistently maintained an interest in the intervals that exist between beings and the relationships formed through them.

Although her media and formal approaches have evolved over time, her commitment to understanding the world as a multilayered field of relations, rather than reducing it to a singular order, remains a continuous thread running throughout her practice.