JIMOK CHOI

Early Years

Born in 1981 in Seoul, Jimok Choi graduated with a BA in Western Painting from Suwon University, Korea in 2006 and an MFA in Fine Arts from the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel in 2013. Returning to Korea in 2022, he now lives and works in Paju.

Jimok Choi: Artworks

Throughout his career, Jimok Choi has been fascinated by the concepts of seeing and being seen. His works centre on painting—which may be interpreted as abstract, although he has suggested he “could say it’s closer to realism”—but also include installation and performance.

Part of Jimok Choi’s practice centres on reinterpretation of traditional forms of art. “The world we see with our eyes doesn’t have fixed angles, so why should we force it into the format of paper or canvas?” he said in 2025. During the early part of his career he created “frames” by quartering and reassembling cultural, national or artistic symbols—for example, a flag, a guitar, portraits or a door—and turning the inner part into the frame, perhaps suggesting his own thoughts on deconstructing social conventions.

He is also focused on light and colour, particularly the concept of the “afterimage” generated in the viewer’s eye after looking at a brightly lit scene or object. This can be linked to Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), rejecting Isaac Newton’s optical ideas and instead arguing that the perception and experience of the eye influences the essence of colour. After the retina has been exposed to a particular light source, it forms images in complementary colours. “Afterimage is an optical illusion caused by the excitement of the visual nerve,” Choi said in 2023.

Choi airbrushes acrylic paint on to canvas to assemble the thick, flowing dominant parts of the afterimage while the dispersed particles of colour around the edges recreate the elements that disappear first from the retina. “Even if we close our eyes, we never stop looking at something,” Choi said in 2024.

• No Exit (2018) saw Jimok Choi quartering and regrouping a Union Flag, creating a picture of an X inside a frame, turning a recognisable international symbol into something entirely different.
• The Light of Absence (2024) initially appears to concentrate on seven circles (green, red, purple and white) yet on prolonged viewing, more shapes appear.
• Blind Landscape (2026) spreads purple into black around a fiery orange circle, perhaps suggesting an eclipse

Jimok Choi: Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• A Hundred Suns, Gallery Baton, Seoul (2025)
• The Blind Landscape—Light passes through me, leaving you behind, Podonamu Art Space, Gwangju (2025)
• The Light of Absence, Chapter II, Seoul (2023)
• Logic-Enter Outside, Kim Chong Yung Museum, Seoul (2022)
• OPEN, Kang Contemporary, Berlin (2020)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Against Ornament, Against the Object, Gallery Baton, Seoul (2026)
• 25th Ha Jungwoong Young Artist Invitation Exhibition: Light 2025, Gwangju Museum of Art, Ha Jungwoong Museum, Gwangju (2025)
• Vanishing, Emerging, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan (2024)
• Metamorphosis, Kim Chong Yung Museum, Seoul (2024)
• Two retinas and one lens under the sky (with Ki Seul Ki), Podonamu Art Space, Gwangju (2023)
• Hass, Galerie ONspace, Kiel (2022)

Further reading

• Jimok Choi’s Instagram
• Jimok Choi explains more about the theory behind his work in an Instagram video made to coincide with his 2025 exhibition A Hundred Suns (2025)
• Notes from Gallery Baton about Jimok Choi’s interpretation of Goethe’s Theory of Colours (2025)
• Jimok Choi’s artist page at Gallery Baton
• YouTube video about The Light of Absence exhibition in Seoul (2023)
• Notes from Open at Kang Contemporary in 2020

Jimok Choi FAQs

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