The Page Gallery

The Page Gallery is pleased to present CHOI MYOUNG YOUNG, the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. The exhibition features Choi’s body of work over four decades, ranging from oil paintings applied by rollers and vertical and horizontal line paintings to the most recent works painted directly by his fingers.

Born in Haeju, Hwanghae-do, in 1941, Choi decided to take a career as an artist after receiving guidance from Sanghwa Chung, one of the most renowned Korean modernist painters. When he was a student at Hongik University, he was a founding member of major movements that led the flow of Korean art, such as Origin and the Korea Avant-Garde Association(AG), and he participated in the formation of "Dansaekhwa" in the mid-1970s.

Conditional Planes is a proposition on which the artist has continued to focus since the mid-70s to the present. While keeping in line with the main theme of Dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome painting, it is the keyword that distinguishes Choi from the others. Since his undergraduate days, when he doubted the role of paintings that represents specific objects, what the artist has persistently explored was the way paintings exist as two-dimensional planes themselves. He identified several characteristics that embody “pictorial reality” as 1) a homogeneous surface, 2) without illusion or center, 3) made by repetitive labor, 4) creating a touch of material on the surface, 5) with a neutral color and 6) opening inner space on the layers of the screen and experimented those figures through various approaches and processes in his paintings.