The Korean Cultural Centre shares the video about Choi Wook-kyung’s 「Joy (1977)」created by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) of its Director’s Talk _MMCA Collection video series.
“Wook-kyung Choi, born in Seoul in 1940, graduated from Seoul Arts High School and the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. She then moved to the United States in 1963, where she received degrees in art and began her career as an artist and art educator. In 1965, she published a collection of poems in English titled Small Stones, revealing her interests in literature for the first time. In the 1970s, she produced artworks and delivered lectures in both Korea and the US, and in 1972, released Like Unfamiliar Faces, a collection of 45 poems in Korean... Working as a professor at Yeungnam University and Duksung Women’s University, she focused on painting on the theme of Korea’s mountains and islands from 1979 until her death in 1985.
Choi was recognized as a representative artist of Korean art in the 1980s, participating in numerous international exhibitions that introduced Korean contemporary art to international audiences, such as the 16th Bienale de São Paulo (1981), Korean Drawing Now (1981) in New York, The Status of Korean Contemporary Art (1982) in Kyoto, and the Salon d’Automne (1982) in Paris. After she died, retrospective exhibition dedicated to her were held at several venues including the MMCA and HoAam Gallery in the late 1980s. Her works are included in the traveling exhibition Women In Abstraction, organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris and held in the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum in Spain, as well as With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932, an exhibition held by ther alma mater, Cranbrook Academy of Art, indicating that even abroad, Choi is still regarded as a woman abstract expressionist who was ahead of time.“ (from the catalogue of the Wook-kyung Choi, Alice' Cat exhibition)
Please click the image below to view the video.
Wook-kyung Choi, Joy, 1977, acrylic on canvas, MMCA Collection
Source from theNational Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea