It was the first week of June, just days before Korea’s first heat wave of the year. Inside what was once a small town church in Seongbuk District, northeastern Seoul, bright summer sunlight streamed through rows of vertical slit windows.
The sunbeams fell upon swarms of painted sinuous lines and colored planes drifting across the building’s mint-hued walls. And as the light shifted with the passing of time, different clusters of feverish strokes shimmered in succession, slowly coming to life.
Such was the quiet spectacle that greeted me upon arriving at TINC (This is Not a Church), a 카지노 church-turned-independent project space, where emerging artist Choi Yoon-hee’s mini-exhibition, “Tuning In,” is currently on view.
Throughout her creative odyssey, Choi has focused on transferring the lingering afterimages of her bodily sensations and impressions gathered from the external world onto canvas via gestural brushstrokes and smeared paints.
Her ongoing presentation is a mini-show in terms of the number of featured works — just three from her latest “Time Standing in a Passage” series — but by no means does it feel that way due to their sheer scale.
The size of the oil paintings — each 6 meters in length and 2.6 meters in height, making them the 38-year-old’s largest creations to date — mirrors the dimensions of the wall in her compact Seoul studio.
This meant that after completing one wall-filling piece, the artist had no choice but to place the next canvas directly over the first to make room — the process that inevitably caused the memory of the previous work to fade away.