RYE CHOI

Choi Rye is a Korean painter who has developed a distinctive visual language over more than a decade by combining traditional water-based woodblock printing with the sensibility of East Asian painting. A graduate of the Department of Korean Painting at Chung-Ang University, she went on to complete her master's in printmaking and her doctorate in art theory at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.

Choi's practice began with the point. Originally a figurative painter working in a style close to Korean animation, she shifted decisively toward the point as her basic pictorial unit following a sketching trip through China's Jiangnan region in the early 2010s. What followed was a period of intense production, with paintings composed of hundreds of hand-stamped points in varying densities and colors. Over time, this vocabulary has continued to condense, and her recent work isolates one or two circles at the center of the composition — a shift that reflects not simply a reduction in form, but a deepening inquiry into how perception itself operates beneath the visible surface of things.

In Choi's work, the circle functions as a form in which presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, coexist. Complete circles, severed circles, and overlapping circles appear across the canvas in shifting densities and tones, while the space between them is left open — not as empty space, but as a site where the viewer's own interpretation enters. In this sense, her paintings resist final resolution, remaining instead open structures that complete themselves differently through each encounter with a viewer.

Technically, Choi works entirely by hand, using a traditional water-based woodblock method with no mechanical processes. A single circle may require dozens of rounds of stamping and drying to complete, a process that allows the natural grain of the woodblock and the layered depth of the pigment to emerge simultaneously. Because this method makes it impossible to reproduce an identical image across a standard print run, each of her works exists as a single, unique print.

Choi's work has been discussed by critics in both China and Korea as a distinctive study in the passage between figuration and abstraction. CAFA professor Chen Qi has written on her transition from representational imagery to point-based composition, while the Korean critic Angu, writing in 2020, examined her circles as a point of convergence for sensory events unfolding on the surface of the painting.

Choi holds a PhD in Art Theory (2019) and an MA in Printmaking (2013) from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and a BA in Korean Painting (2008) from Chung-Ang University. She has held numerous solo and group exhibitions across Korea and China, and her work is held in the collections of the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing and the Yichun Art Museum in China. She continues to participate in major Korean art fairs, including Kiaf SEOUL, Galleries Art Fair, Art Busan, and BAMA.