Weserhalle is pleased to present “Following the Curves”, the debut solo exhibition in Germany by Korean artist Jiwon Choi. Known for her evocative paintings that tread the delicate line between stillness and surrealism, Choi builds a world where porcelain dolls, ornamental foliage, and domestic relics reside in a suspended state—between memory and awakening, life and afterlife.
With a practice rooted in the fusion of still life, landscape, and portraiture, Choi captures the theatricality of the everyday. Drawing from the language of decorative arts and ancestral nostalgia, her subjects are porcelain figures that quietly echo past lives. Once discarded or overlooked, they now appear quietly awakened—tenderly poised behind swaying orchids and slender blades of grass, engaged in private rituals within painted sanctuaries.
The works in this series reflect Choi’s ongoing dialogue with absence and presence. Each piece is a chamber of convergence: natural and artificial, intimate and uncanny. Echoing the reflective surface of memory, her canvases shimmer with a peculiar contradiction—what appears glossy is matte; what looks still, brims with the possibility of movement. Like the fading tick of a chiming clock in her grandmother’s home, time in Choi’s universe is elastic and cyclical.
The orchid becomes a recurring protagonist in this exhibition. Blooming and wilting within the confines of Choi’s studio, its tender curves and chromatic gradients are translated into compositional devices. Slender stems frame the doll-like figures, often partially obscuring them, enhancing a sense of gentle distance—as if the viewer is quietly intruding upon an intimate moment. These images are not merely aesthetic compositions but diaristic entries—visual notations of longing, solitude, and resilience.
Choi refers to her work as a space for “beauty, healing, sadness, and emptiness,” and this emotional ambiguity is tangible throughout the exhibition. Her figures are not just objects of the gaze, but vessels of personal and collective memory—expressing a layered tenderness that merges loss with grace. In these paintings, beauty is not ornamental but contemplative; charm lies in eccentricity and quiet tension. The delicate strangeness of her compositions lingers—like a half-remembered dream.
Through her background in Western painting, with BFA and MFA degrees from Ewha Womans University, Choi has developed a painterly language that renders the inanimate with sentient vitality. Her brushwork—at once controlled and spontaneous—plays with perception, occasionally tricking the eye into believing these images are three-dimensional reliefs or sculptural forms. Upon closer look, the gaze of each figure reveals something more: an emotion barely withheld, a story half-told.
The exhibition offers a glimpse into the artist’s evolving visual diary—a garden of ambiguous beauty and quiet epiphanies. It is a space where nostalgia germinates and future selves begin to take shape, framed by shadowed leaves and the glint of porcelain skin.
