Frieze Seoul 2025: Booth C10

Gallery Chosun will take part in Frieze Seoul 2025, held from September 3 to 6, highlighting artists Sunghong Min, Minjung Woo, and Sooryeon Choe, marking its return after its participation in 2024. These artists will delicately and beautifully present the narrative that commonly appears in their work under the theme of ‘Myth and Narrative.’

At a time when everyone speaks of artificial intelligence, scientific technology, and growth, Gallery Chosun seeks to return to ‘Myth and Narrative.’. In an era where optimism for the future is fading, empathy is waning and uncertainty remains about whether things will improve, the power of storytelling is more vital than ever. The three artists Sunghong Min, Minjung Woo, and Sooryeon Choe summon narrative through diverse media and perspectives. Sunghong Min’s works reassemble discarded objects and deconstructed images, presenting traces and stories of the people who once used and cherished them. Through his hands, the emotions of those repeatedly forced to part with their familiar surroundings amid urban redevelopment and migration are reconnected. His pieces invite viewers to imagine the enduring narratives of objects and beings that are surely fated to be forgotten. Minjung Woo carves mythic images into clay panels. Her motifs figures in motion, forms of animals and plants, elements like fire and water remind us of the primordial order of birth myths before this universe was brought into existence, evoking continuity and a flowing time like running water. Her world shaped by the elemental forces of earth, fire and water, her world, complemented by the breath (air) of both artist and viewers - is strikingly intricate and dynamic. Sooryeon Choe paints traditional Northeast Asian female ghosts and celestial maidens. She then copies Chinese characters from incomprehensible Chinese myths on the canvases. Through her work, she demands that viewers engage with silenced and adrift women as well as the objectified ‘Orient’ in a fresh narrative in her expanded painting.

These artists offer new directions for people adrift in a world permeated with reason and logic. Through art, they seek to re-examine conversations about belief in humanity, connection with others, and the magic that transforms the impossible into possibility - we have long forgotten - by crafting new narratives and inviting fresh ways of reading. Gallery Chosun hopes that through their works presented at Frieze Seoul 2025, viewers may recover a sense of hope and anticipation for beauty.

Sunghong Min (b. 1972) majored in Western painting at Chugye University for the Arts and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Since his first solo exhibition, The Island: Garden (Diego Rivera Gallery, 2002), Min has presented his work in New York, Los Angeles, Montana, and Seoul, and participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects. He received Wumin Art Prize in 2019 and Pak Dong Jun Prize in 2023. He works across various mediums, including photos, photo collage, sculpture, installation, and painting. Yet, his signature visual strategy lies in the point where he assembles deconstructed objects and fragmented images. These assembled forms generate vivid energy and theatrical presence in front of viewers.

As his central motive, Min reflects on how shocking it was to see his home and neighborhood - once filled with cherished memories - transformed by redevelopment with familiar objects discarded in the process. Min’s artistic practice revolves around salvaging discarded items, bringing them into his studio, weaving, and assembling them, and ultimately turning them into works of art. This process serves as both a gentle caress of the memories embedded in these objects and a gesture that reveals the violence of capitalist displacement and abandonment. Hence, his pieces resemble people who were constantly forced to move. They are suspended in midair, perched precariously, or rolling on wheels, all of which symbolize temporality and mobility of being. In his 2017 exhibition Dasirak: Playing with Everyone, Min ‘played together’ with these assemblages on stage, performing as if he were enacting a ritual to reconnect with past users and their memories. His use of antennas reflects the fact that he is interested in connecting art with reality. In Hard-of-Hearing Area: Antenna Bird (2016), Sunghong Min created a structure combining a bird’s head with an antenna body and wandered in search of the strongest radio broadcast signals. This was his expressive effort to link his art to the world beyond the art gallery. Min beautifully weaves useless objects and images and turns them into works of art and then opens the door to new stories. In his work, the inside and outside of art museum, object and human, art and daily life are connected with bead ornaments and thread flowing flexibly along the creases between reality and art—just like in Practice for Variability (2020), where discarded decorative landscape paintings are meticulously folded.

Minjung Woo (b. 1985) earned her BFA and MFA in traditional painting from Seoul National University and has participated in a variety of solo and group exhibitions while primarily working in Seoul. Her signature lies in the earthen canvas she and the figures she carves upon it evoking mythical narratives. Woo coats wood panels with hemp and spreads a thin layer of clay. She refers to this surface as “a wall,” a symbolic threshold between the self and the world. The artist unfolds long-forgotten stories on this wall she painstakingly crafts.

Woo’s process of building a clay wall is both sculptural and ritualistic: she blends clay with water into a fine paste, applies it onto hemp-covered plywood, and allows it to dry for several days before carving into this clay wall with an awl. Clay is commonly used for sculpture and the way of digging into the canvas and creating depth recalls a stage of sculptural process. Her drawings, built through layers of sculptural materials and uneven hollow reliefs shaped by controlled force, can be viewed as an experimental gesture that challenges the conventional painting expression method. The process of layering, drying, and carving mirrors geological sedimentation and erosion, inviting the viewer to imagine the long passage of time and the shifting transformations of matters. Observing the stratification of time within the material slowly, Woo inscribes repetitive patterns and motifs in a manner resembling a meditative practice.

She usually depicts a human body and elements like plants, water, fire, wind, snakes, and bees that are in constant motion. These organic shapes echo symbols found in myths and folktales. Notably, water and fire along with clay were among the four classical elements that ancient Greeks believed constituted the universe. The final element, air, possibly is both the breath Woo infuses into the work – through layering, drying, carving, and painting on the clay panels - and the breath of the viewer as they engage with her world. This way, Woo constructs her universe and fills it with mythical symbols and narratives. The human body and other figures she portrays are expressed as a continuous flow of curved movement. This, along with clay, symbolizes the link between the passage of time and the interconnectedness of all things in the cosmos. These endlessly interwoven relationships not only exist on the clay wall but also extend beyond it to reality, reflecting the artist’s Buddhist-influenced perspective, where all beings exist in relation with one another. 

Sooryeon Choe (b. 1986) studied painting at Hongik University and earned her MFA in Western Art from Seoul National University. Working mainly in Seoul, Choe was rewarded with the 2020 Chongkundang Yesuljisang Art Prize. Choe draws inspiration from myths, legends, ghost stories, and folklore in the Northeast Asian region. Her interest lies not in replicating classical images but in interpreting the phenomenon of their contemporary representation through painting. Her approach includes a process of recontextualizing Asian traditions shaped by a Western male-centric order, as well as external perspectives on mystical portrayals of Asian women which have been misunderstood.

Her paintings often depict ghostly or fairy-like women. These figures appear in cliché scenes from East Asian folktales and vintage films that Choe has collected in Korea and China. They are either spirits of wronged women - wandering specters trapped between realms due to an unjust death or objects of desire in fantasies. They can be seen as objectified femininity and East Asian imagery, shaped by in a Western centric-male order, yet far beyond the domains of science and reason. Choe brings them back onto the canvas – figures who have long struggled to find their places. She tries to draw them faintly and elusively, replacing traditional imagery with unfamiliar forms and resisting a clear order and a conventional definition. In her contextualizing process, she not only endeavors to show traditions surrounding women and Asia perceived by westerners but also experiments with the manifestation of traditional painting. Unknown beings evade suspicion that they are merely illusions of reality in figurative painting, while the hazy and distant depiction of objects frustrates the viewer’s desire for clarity. The same applies to her repeated use of illegible Chinese characters layered onto the painting. Her act of copying legends and folktales circumvents the notion of sensual and free artistic expression. It can be seen as an effort to layer drawing, copying, discipline and creativity over one another on to the painting. Her unreadable texts transform into images and obstruct the viewer’s ability to interpret them. Though the characters and women are before you, they are incomprehensible, unreadable, and unclear. Choe urges the viewers to engage with her work in a new way, breaking away from the conventional forms of appreciation. While shifting clichéd images of women and the East Asia beyond the realm of irrational objectification, she invites viewers into a sensory experience that challenges the established painterly grammar and certainty.