Bold Order in Color: Choi Hong-won's Oils Reimagine Korean Identity
Creatrip Team
3 months ago
An encore special exhibition, "Painting Life, K-Seonghwangdang," runs through the 13th at Wonju Gamyeong Art Center, spotlighting the late artist Choi Hong-won’s unique oils. Choi used a Western medium—oil paint—to express distinctly Korean colors, forms, and folk spirituality centered on the seonghwangdang (village shrine). The show, in two connected galleries, traces the artist’s journey: A-gallery offers views of Gangwon Gamyeong and an immersive sense of Korean lyricism, while B-gallery presents late works from Choi’s travels to seonghwangdang across the country, where mythic imagery, place-based meaning, and painterly qualities converge. A pioneer of Gangwon art education, Choi left some 7,800 works and developed a personal style that fuses bold, rhythmic use of obangsaek (five traditional colors), structural symbolism, and modern sensibility. Critics praise him for creating a Korean aesthetic without imitating Western models; his seonghwangdang paintings reinterpret these ritual spaces as sites of identity and longing across Korea’s divided history. The curators say the exhibition’s flow allows visitors to deeply experience Choi’s perspective and philosophy.
