EUNJEONG CHOI, ROH GIPPEUM

In dialogue with silence, space, and invisible forces, both Choi and Roh negotiate the boundary between form and its absence — the seen and the unsaid. Their works evoke a hushed tension: patterns that hover, edges that dissolve, volumes that emerge from ether. While Choi leans into geometry and rhythmic structure, Roh allows her forms to breathe, mutate, and return to formlessness.

Eunjeong Choi (b.1980- Korea)

Choi’s trajectory is rooted in architectural thinking and discipline. Holding an MFA and Ph.D. in Painting from Hongik University, she began with monochrome, grid-based works and over time expanded into richly layered compositions that fuse natural motifs with structural systems. Through subtle shifts of tone, interlocking modules, and controlled gesture, Choi’s paintings explore ecological fragility, the interplay between built environments and organic systems, and the meditative act of looking. Awarded the Soorim Art Prize (2018) and recognized by the SOMA Drawing Center (2019), she has also served as a Meta Open Arts Seoul commission artist in 2022. Her work invites viewers to rest in ambiguity and to sense the relational network between nature, architecture, and human perception.

Roh Gippeum (b.1991- Korea)

Originally trained in ceramics and actively working across sculpture and painting, Roh Gippeum experiments with the translation of three-dimensional form into painterly space. Drawing inspiration from movements in 20th-century sculpture and phenomenological philosophy (notably Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on perception), she collapses the dichotomy between object and image. Her sculptural works arise from the visual grammar of her paintings: the volumetric echoes of biomorphic forms, the sinuous contours of shadows, the interplay of light and mass. As she herself remarks, when she steps away from a painting, she often returns to craft a sculpture — as though the latent form demands physical presence. In her paintings, still life-inspired motifs dissolve into patterns and atmospheric fields; in her ceramic sculptures, the same patterns gain tactile surface and corporeal volume. Roh’s intention is to see objects not as fixed things, but as phenomena to be apprehended anew — as forms that emerge from the active engagement of gaze and hand.

By placing Choi and Roh in conversation, The Poetics of Silence spotlights two generations of Korean women artists who reconceive abstraction as an intimate, introspective language. Their works gesture toward silence — not as emptiness but as fertile possibility. In this space of hushed exchange, abstraction becomes voice. And in the silence, we hear not absence, but resonance.