Jiwon Choi

Jiwon Choi paints in oil, combining still life, landscape and portraiture around porcelain dolls, antique objects and decorative relics. She is drawn to things that are smooth yet lifeless, such as ceramic figures and taxidermied insects, and to objects that have ended their life but still bear on her present. Frames, doors and windows serve as thresholds between life and death, memory and waking. The orchid, which she watches bloom and wilt in her studio, recurs as a compositional device, its stems framing and partly hiding the figures so the viewer seems to intrude on a private moment. Choi's brushwork tricks the eye: matte passages read as glossy, flat surfaces pass for relief, still figures seem about to move. She sets the sleekness of porcelain against sharp elements such as thorns, flames, tears or lenses, and describes her paintings as a space for beauty, healing, sadness and emptiness.