Harper’s is happy to announce Quieter and Colder, New York-based artist Hyegyeong Choi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Choi, who was born and raised in Korea, historically paints shapely ladies who take pleasure in surreal environments. These putting figures subvert stifling conceptions of magnificence as they relaxation their nude our bodies amidst lush terrain and electrical swimming pools of water. However for Choi, water just isn’t all the time a website of respite: the crucial supply of life has been an emblem of emotional turmoil for the artist who has survived the troubles of self-destruction. Throughout Quieter and Colder, Choi reckons with the plight of this psychological trauma throughout immersive figurative work. In these new works, intrepid protagonists overcome treacherous landscapes, embodying Choi’s odyssey via the afflictions of public notion and the tribulations of psychological well being.
The artist’s intimate relationship to mourning manifests in melancholic temporalities among the many works that comprise Quieter and Colder. Within the portray Hiding in My Studio, massive ladies shake off profound blues as if coming alive once more after an arduous slumber. They emerge from the depths of a pond surrounded by an esoteric cave. Beautiful flowers float alongside this introspective oasis, gesturing in the direction of the ephemeral nature of life and the cycles of dying and revival that provoke existence. As the ladies slowly awaken their senses to the enigmatic panorama, they bathe, catch fish, and paint with unbridled curiosity. Colour performs a liberatory function right here: at instances, beaming orange mild slices via the somber blue pigment, directing hope on this scene of rebirth. However as the attention wanders in the direction of the background of the visible airplane, we’re swiftly displaced from the phantasm of uninhibited freedom: a bevy of unassuming onlookers, camouflaging among the many rocky partitions of the catacomb, elicit the voyeuristic gaze of undesirable critique.
We witness the haunts of psychological unease and corporeal restraint once more in Excavation. Right here, ladies sunbathe as they lie towards scorched earth. Three figures naked their limbs to the solar, soaking within the blazing warmth of the scorching day. The our bodies, very like the panorama, are shaded in heat tones: wealthy yellow and deep auburn conjure the dizzying stupor of a day on the seaside. However on this jarring scene, there isn’t any sea to flee to. These ladies face undetermined fates as an alternative as they sink into huge holes within the earth, threatening to destabilize their day of relaxation.
Repeatedly, all through Quieter and Colder, Choi portrays the unsettling nature of being born to a human physique. For the artist, residing in a human physique is a check of endurance—a life topic to ceaseless remark and judgment. Choi visualizes this existential strife with gripping symbolism in Uncharted Water. The towering work, impressed by the nineteenth-century romantic portray The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, reveals a crew of girls clamoring for security as they converge with an iceberg. Some attain for the sky, throwing glimmering flower petals towards the trail of futurity. Others lunge into doomed fates as they bounce away from their companions and into the icy waters beneath them. The apocalyptic scene staged in solemn teal and turquoise, demonstrates the emotional friction that plagues human existence. Finally, the protagonists of Quieter and Colder reckon with mortality itself. Choi, together with her impassioned method to figuration, captures the perplexing dichotomy between the human will to stay and the desire to die.