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.