Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Minyoung Choi has held solo exhibitions including 《Midnight Walk》 (Gallery Baton, Seoul, 2025), 《Dreams for Hire》 (Space K, Seoul, 2024), and 《Dark Brightness》 (Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Choi 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). 

Awards (Selected)

Choi was awarded the Next Generation Art Prize at the 2018 Wells Art Contemporary Award.

Residencies (Selected)

Choi was selected for residencies at the Slade Summer School and the Olvera Contemporary Art Centre in 2017.

Collections (Selected)

Choi’s works are included in the collections of Space K, X Museum (China), Soho House Collection (UK), and the HSBC Art Collection (UK).

Originality & Identity

Minyoung Choi’s practice begins at the boundary where reality and unreality meet. From her early works, she has experimented with juxtaposing unreal beings within everyday spaces, constructing situations that invite viewers to naturally accept “scenes that should not be possible” (e.g., Sleeping Sharks(2018)). This approach is not merely a surrealist technique, but rather a reconstruction of emotion shaped by childhood memory and experiences of migration. Her formative years in Eoeun-dong and her present life in London are connected as a single emotional map in 《Dreams for Hire》(Space K, Seoul, 2024).
 
In the two-person exhibition 《Curtain Call》(ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, 2022), works such as Slightly Frightened Creatures Coming Down the Stairs(2022), Blue Cat(2022), and Sleeping Fish(2022) visualize layers of the unconscious through beings the artist calls “Slightly Frightened Creatures.” These life forms reveal a state in which anxiety and curiosity, strangeness and familiarity intermingle, appearing as entities that either replace or accompany humans. From this period onward, animals move beyond mere symbolism and become active agents mediating memory and emotion.
 
In 《Dreams for Hire》(2024), personal memory becomes more concretely tied to specific geography. In the ‘Han River’ series—Bridges(2024), City Life(2024), Han River Water Play(2024), and Night Swimming(2024)—the narrative of the river dolphin overlays the real site of the Han River with the foreign presence of the Amazon river dolphin. Although the image is unreal, it functions within the painting as part of everyday life. Through such juxtapositions, the artist constructs “a world where strange things feel natural.”
 
In her recent solo exhibition 《Midnight Walk》(Gallery Baton, Seoul, 2025), works such as Sleepless Nights(2025) and Dear Storm(2025) further expand her worldview. Here, the distinction between reality and dream becomes looser, and night operates as a stage where emotion and perception intersect. While the subject matter gradually extends from personal memory toward collective imagination and mythic structure, the narrative continues to be guided by the flow of emotion.

Style & Contents

Choi’s work is fundamentally grounded in the traditional medium of oil on linen. Yet her spatial compositions are theatrical, and her scenes are constructed almost like stage sets. In Bedroom(2023), the striped light created by window blinds organizes the interior into a single scene, blurring the boundary between inside and outside. This approach develops further in Accidental Dream(2024) and Unknown(2024), where an interior space and a snow-covered cliff are connected within a single frame.
 
Light is a central formal element in her paintings. In Sun Moon Tea(2024), day and night coexist within one composition; in Moon Ritual(2024), a ceremonial scene unfolds beneath a full moon. In Dear Storm, a soft light envelops figures and animals, regulating the rhythm of viewing. Light does not function merely as illumination, but as a device that modulates emotional temperature and the density of the scene.
 
The scale of animals is another significant formal characteristic. In Night Swimming, the massive river dolphin appears as a presence more overwhelming than humans, yet the figures accept it naturally. In Sleeping Sharks, animals are depicted not as threats but as companions in emotional coexistence. Such shifts in scale do not overturn hierarchy, but instead visualize the coexistence of human and nonhuman beings.
 
In recent works, color has become more intensely saturated, with blue and green serving as dominant tones. In 《Midnight Walk》, the space above and below the water’s surface intersects, and while compositions become more simplified, sensorial density is heightened. Whereas earlier works generated tension through compositional structure, recent paintings form emotion through the concentration of color and atmosphere.

Topography & Continuity

Within contemporary painting, Minyoung Choi employs surreal imagination while maintaining distance from automatic gesture or extreme grotesqueness. Her distinctiveness lies in sustaining a stable balance even when juxtaposing heterogeneous elements. This is evident in works such as Landscape (Fish Tank)(2023) and Visitors(2024), where interior and exterior, human and animal coexist within a single scene.
 
While animal imagery is widely used in contemporary Korean painting, Choi does not fix it as a symbolic device. In works such as Visitors(2024), which features a lion-dance mask, Moonbow(2024), and Moon Ritual(2024), inspired by the moon rabbit, folkloric elements are not presented as the reproduction of a specific tradition. Rather, they are combined with personal memory and reconfigured into newly imagined beings.
 
Her international position is also gradually expanding. 《The Painted Room》(GRIMM, Amsterdam, 2023) was curated by the Scottish female artist Caroline Walker—who has experienced explosive growth in the European art market in the 2020s—and featured a selection of emerging next-generation artists personally chosen by her, among whom Minyoung Choi was included. This context signifies that her work resonates not only within a regional framework but within contemporary painting discourse more broadly.
 
In addition, exhibitions such as 《Dark Brightness》(Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2023) and 《Romancing Dissent》(Sixi Museum, Nanjing, 2023), along with activities at major institutions across the Netherlands, Spain, China, and the United Kingdom, demonstrate that she is an emerging artist receiving sustained international attention. Even as the geographical and cultural contexts shift, her narrative structure—overlapping reality and dream—and her organization of emotion through light and color remain consistent, allowing her world to expand while maintaining a stable and coherent continuity.