Legacy of Painting Alumna Choi Wook-kyung Celebrated in Seoul Economic Daily Feature
Choi, Wook-kyung, An Unfinished Story. Courtesy of the artist and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.
Cranbrook Academy of Art celebrates the enduring legacy of alumna Choi Wook-kyung (MFA Painting 1965), whose work is the subject of a new feature essay in the Seoul Economic Daily. Written by Ryu Ji-yeon, Head of Collection Management and Research at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), the piece centers on a pivotal chapter in Choi’s artistic development: a ten-month stay in New Mexico in 1976 that profoundly transformed her painting.
Choi Wook-kyung (1940–1985) was a Korean painter, poet, and educator who made a distinctive choice at the outset of her career: when most Korean artists of her generation looked to Europe for advanced study, she came to the United States. After graduating from Seoul National University’s Department of Painting, she enrolled in the MFA painting program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she studied from 1963 to 1966. She also studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York. During this period, she published an English-language poetry collection, Small Stones (1965), and in 1968 was appointed assistant professor at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, her first position as an art educator.
The Seoul Economic Daily essay focuses on the series “An Unfinished Story,” painted during and after Choi’s time in New Mexico. Having lived primarily in the northeastern United States, she encountered the Southwest for the first time during this period and was struck by its vast deserts, brilliant light, and open plains. She also began working with acrylic paint for the first time — drawn to its faster drying time — and experimented with unconventional supports including iron panels, plastic boards, and veneer. The New Mexico period produced large-scale paintings whose diagonal lines, curving forms, and sun-saturated color evoke both the physical landscape and the emotional experience of encountering it. Ryu Ji-yeon describes the works as an “inner monologue” — pieces of emotion, memory, and experience that resist full resolution in words — and situates them as marking a period of confident, expansive creative ambition.
A solo exhibition of the New Mexico works was held at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, followed by the touring exhibition “Greetings from New Mexico,” shown at American Cultural Centers in Seoul, Daegu, and Busan from 1978 to 1979. After returning to Korea in 1979, Choi taught at Yeungnam University and Duksung Women’s University and turned her attention to Korean landscapes, carrying forward the vibrant palette developed in New Mexico into paintings of Korean mountains and islands. She participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (1981), exhibitions in New York and Kyoto, and the Salon d’Automne in Paris (1982).
“An Unfinished Story” can currently be seen in the permanent exhibition “Highlights of Korean Contemporary Art” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.
Learn more:
New Mexico Desert Transformed Choi Wook-kyung’s Paintings – Seoul Economic Daily
