금호미술관

Jiwon Choi paints scenes in which beauty and tension intersect through smooth, ornamental objects. She places porcelain dolls, China Dolls originally produced in 19th-century Europe, into unfamiliar contexts, transforming them into estranged sculptural forms. Across her compositions, opposing elements coexist—classical faces and contemporary clothing, volumetric shading and flat planes of color, East Asian objects and Western artifacts, the living and the taxidermized—intensifying the sense of tension. The meticulously rendered surfaces elicit a tactile sensation, as if the viewer were tracing the objects with their eyes. Rather than merely overlaying a contemporary appearance onto porcelain, Choi employs form and surface as conduits through which the narratives condensed within these objects are made visible.
 

In Glazed Fever, the artist enlarges the doll's face to an overwhelming scale, drawing out the latent heat simmering beneath its hardened surface. “Glazed” refers not only to the lustrous finish of ceramics but also to the doll's blank, affectless expression. Tinted in a terracotta hue, the doll's face evokes the material properties of clay that hardens after passing through intense heat, revealing a once-cooled presence now encountering a renewed fever. Choi does not confine this heat to physical temperature but extends it into an emotional register shaped by obsession and desire. The orchids that fill the canvas carry within them the history of such longing. Here, the artist references the “Orchid Fever” that emerged in 19th-century England, when exotic and sensuous plants brought from the colonies incited a collecting craze among Victorian explorers and enthusiasts. As orchid collecting and study were largely dominated by men, women's participation remained limited. Against this historical backdrop, Choi envisions a woman who claims and contemplates orchids. The doll's flushed face before them captures the moment when suppressed desire rises to the surface. Placed side by side, the porcelain doll and the orchid—both transported from distant lands to Europe as objects of collection—appear to gaze at one another. In the charged space between them, viewers are invited to confront the intertwined histories of beauty, desire, and the gaze that seeks to behold and possess them.