youngbin choi (Edge), 37x37cm, Oil on canvas, 2020.JPG
Vidi Gallery (9, Toegye-ro 18 gil, Jung-Gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea ) is currently presenting “Traces of Time, Colors Shaped by Memory,” a three-artist exhibition featuring works by Choi Youngbin, Choi Eunhye, and Choi Jaei, on view from December 5 to January 6.
The three painters translate scenes drawn from reality and impressions rooted in their inner worlds into distinct painterly languages, offering a multi-layered visual landscape in which experiences are interpreted, rearranged, and expanded.
Observation, memory, and spontaneity converge into cohesive structures within each artist’s practice, revealing unique visualizations of time’s passage and the emotional shifts embedded within it.
Together, their works create a network of sensory expressions and intersecting perspectives that define the exhibition.
Choi Youngbin constructs painterly spaces where parts and wholes, imagination and memory, color and value—elements that resist simultaneous grasp—coexist within a single frame.
Choi Youngbin, Discrete Arrangement (Becoming Many), 122.5 × 69 cm, Oil on canvas, 2020
Instead of emphasizing binary oppositions like light and darkness, the artist focuses on relationships in which dynamic and static qualities harmonize, producing rhythms that inhabit even a single brushstroke.
Through recurring marks and grids that segment the canvas, Choi anchors points and gestures into a visual tempo, creating structures that capture fragments of time while observing the fleeting boundary between emergence and disappearance.
Choi Eunhye collects moments in life where boundaries blur, translating the sensory tension between experience and memory into layered colors and forms.
Choi Eunhye, Layers of Time, 80.3 × 100 cm, Oil on canvas, 2024
Fading light, transient movements, and abstracted impressions of landscapes merge with recollection, generating new temporalities and tonalities within the artwork.
The recurring motif of mountains—drawn from images gathered in Iceland, Norway, and other regions—takes on varied meanings, transforming into glaciers, auroras, or masses of light, and adopting fluid forms shaped by inner vision.
Choi Eunhye, Layers of Time, 80.3 × 100 cm, Oil on canvas, 2024
In series such as Toned Landscape and Layers of Time, the artist reveals the strata of color formed in moments where the real and unreal overlap, guiding viewers toward the liminal spaces between them.
Her work consistently investigates relationships between the visible and the unseen, the surface and the depth.
Choi Jaei paints the wind through intuitive brushwork, using photographs of resonant landscapes as quiet companions rather than strict references.
Choi Jaei, The Sanctuary 63, 60.6 × 72.7 cm, Oil on canvas, 2025
Beginning with the first trace of wind on an empty canvas, the artist repeatedly erases and repaints before the pigment dries, allowing the work to continuously reconfigure itself.
This process becomes both a meditative immersion in emotional currents and a performative engagement with time.
The wind's imagined trajectory often transforms dramatically during painting, deviating from the artist’s initial vision, while the grain of emotion remains embedded in the grain of the wind.
A solitary house nestled among plants emerges as the final point in this journey—at once a refuge, a sanctuary, and a contemplative resting place.
Choi Jaei, The Sanctuary 76, 72.7 × 60.6 cm, Oil on canvas, 2025
Centering personal emotion over grand narratives, the artist continues to craft paintings that offer quiet solace to many.
