MINYOUNG CHOI

As an artist, Choi uses memories and images from her personal experiences to create surrealistic landscapes with free narrative structures where memory intersects with fantasy. The strange yet familiar scenes that appear in her work evoke visual illusions reminiscent of dream imagery, while creating subtle fissures in everyday experience. In the process, she presents the viewer with a different perspective as she reveals the latent emotions and imagination in the cracks of reality.

Presented after the success of Choi’s Space K Seoul exhibition, Dreams for Hire (Dec. 12, 2024 - Feb. 23, 2025), this exhibition showcases her process of gradually expanding her worldview with narratives elicited from deep internal strata. 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 forms 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. 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.

The creatures that appear repeatedly in Choi’s work—including owls, cats, rabbits, turtles, carp, and catfish—hold various symbolic meanings in Eastern and Western culture. Though familiar, they present themselves in disparate ways in unexpected settings, functioning as a form of dépaysement: a visual transition toward what André Breton referred to as a “pure internal model.”

With their juxtapositions of contradictory elements, the images appear to present someone’s dream, eliciting a poetic immersion with the spreading of mystical light. Indeed, light functions as a key element in Minyoung Choi’s work. Different light sources—from moonlight and twilight to artificial forms of illumination—determine not only the compositions of her work but also the rhythms associated with their viewing. In Dear Storm (2025), soft light surrounds young fish and snowman figures in a pond setting, capturing a moment of communion with life. The silent gestures amid the falling snow and the faceless gazes clearly show the essence of pure emotion. Another work, Nighttime Bathing (2025), juxtaposes cold winter air with a pond teeming with life and a family of turtles in its waters, visualizing the contradictory sense associated with the coexistence of differing elements. As they take the viewer on a journey of emotions that are strange yet familiar, these images guide them to swim through a scene of inner memory and fantasy.

Minyoung Choi lives and works in London. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in painting from Seoul National University and a master’s degree from the Slade School of Fine Art. She has held solo exhibitions at Space K in Seoul (2024); Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2023), Olvera Contemporary Art Centre (2017) and participated in group exhibitions at Sixi Museum in Nanjing(2023); Daejeon Creative Center of Daejeon Museum of Art (2023). 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.