About

Gallery Chosun presents Mustard Seed Garden Grave (芥子園 墓叢), a solo exhibition by Choi Su-ryeon, from October 10 to December 7, 2026. * For the past few years, I have been hand-copying Qing-dynasty zhiguai tales (tales of the strange) and traditional Northeast Asian painting theory, and studying their Korean translations. Some of the notes that came out of this study looked, in some ways, better than my earlier paintings, so I saw no reason they could not become paintings. The notes go like this. Classical Chinese is usually written fairly neatly and large in black, and some difficult, complex characters are almost drawn rather than written. Readings and Korean interpretations are added in whatever colors happen to be at hand. Lines go crooked; typos are erased and rewritten; missing characters, noticed late, are squeezed in; fluorescent colors divide sections or mark what matters. Sometimes I write my own translation under an existing one, or write my literal translation first and add the smoother phrasing of the existing translation in parentheses. Now and then I also jot down criticism of the historical background or the characters. Through this process, unfamiliar and familiar languages mix on the surface, faded colors sit beside bright, fresh ones, and what I know is clearly separated from what I don't. Seen through the eyes of language, this is about penmanship practice and translation; seen through the eyes of painting, it is a process in which unexpected colors and forms thankfully rise up ahead of my will and naturally build an inevitable composition. * Among the small mounds that may have stood in the "Mustard Seed Garden" of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (芥子園畫傳), I imagined that some might be graves. I supposed that something "wicked and sinister" lay buried beneath that small garden where profound conversations about painting once took place. If the stories that run through the works mostly come out of graves, the images placed alongside the text are summoned from traditional Northeast Asian painting, including the Mustard Seed Garden Manual. Trees, rocks, waves, hills and houses from Korea, China and Japan, each in a slightly different style, form ordinary landscapes that could illustrate any story. In the process, the results are at times deft, but mostly clumsy. *** Held at two venues, the exhibition is broadly divided into paintings and drawings. Gallery Chosun mainly shows large paintings that reference the composition of Persian miniatures, while WWNN presents drawings that experiment with comic-style composition, doodles, reverse sides and attached slips.