Hyegyeong Choi

Using a combination of precise swirling palette knives and thick, layered acrylics, HyeGyeong Choi's painting delves into the intricate socio-cultural dynamics she navigates as a female subject. Her works, emblematic of phantasmagorical terrains are populated with extramundane flora and fauna and employ a vibrant chromatic spectrum with whimsical visual motifs. Employing media such as watercolors, colored pencils, ink pens, and intermittently acrylics, her evocative and intense compositions often feature rotund-faced entities ensconced in landscapes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch's iconography. These habitats, punctuated by lilac-hued suns, amber clouds, passion fruit hillocks, floral efflorescences, and phallic fungi, coalesce to engross the observer in a mesmeric visual tableaux. Rooted in her Korean heritage, Choi grapples with the prescriptive aesthetic paradigms imposed upon women, delineating a specific archetype of femininity. Her artistry audaciously engages with discourses surrounding corporeal perception, self-identity, gender constructs, and sexual identity, thereby contesting and critiquing the entrenched sexual prescriptions in Korean ethos that perpetuate female objectification. ...

Founded in 1997, Harper’s is dedicated to exploring relationships between fine art and print media. Drawing on founder Harper Levine’s decades-long career as a rare book dealer, the original location at 87 Newtown Lane remains a cultural hub of the East End.