Stochastic Drift
Studio In Factory, by Chunbum Park, June 24, 2025
Ahyun Jeon, Ppeace 02, 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas.16 x 20 inches
“Stochastic Drift,” at Studio In Factory includes 26 artists, many of them alumni of SVA and Pratt’s MFA Fine Arts programs, engage with the questions of what contemporary art should or could be. What is the future direction of contemporary art (specifically painting) in the opinions of artists who hold master’s in fine arts from graduate schools in NYC? Works by five of the artists highlight the core ideas that emerge from this dialogue and all originate from South Korea: Woosik Choi, Sangho Han, Herok, Ahyun Jeon, and Yerang Moon.
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South Korean artists often go through the hagwons (or after-school cram schools) for art and must pass the highly rigorous and technical “ipsi” art training curriculum. (Similar things could be said about Chinese and Japanese art education.) This means that South Korean artists have a very strong grasp of the foundational skills as a strong base onto which they can develop their art towards higher plateaus. Furthermore, as a country that went through rapid modernization, industrialization, and democratization after the Korean War (1950-53), South Korea holds cultural and societal values that are hybrids of Eastern and Western, yet distinctly Korean and simultaneously democratic at its core. Unlike their predecessors who were active in the New York art scene from the 1950s to the 1980s, the artists originating from Japan today are heavily invested in anime and the Superflat movement. On the other hand, Chinese artists lost much of their cultural and historical continuity during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and must refrain from insulting the Communist government. On a general note, of the artists originating from Northeast Asia, South Korean (and perhaps Taiwanese) painters could carry the more ideal qualities in the eyes of the American and the larger western audiences. More specifically, the qualities of South Korean painters could furnish them with the freedom to engage with painting as a political and ideological tool to question and re-imagine the status quo. For example, the South Korean painter Chun Kyung-Ja (1924-2015) made self-portraits of herself as an Asian woman infused with a modern ideology and outlook. Lee Jung-seob (1916-1956) was another great artist who depicted cows including "White Ox" (1954) in a highly modern yet original style, which paid homage to Pablo Picasso's self-portraits involving bullfights as well as the Minotaur.
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Sangho Han’s “Untitled” (2021) which the artist made before completing his master’s degree at SVA. This earlier work of Han’s is stylistically situated in a liminal space between Abstract Expressionism and Philip Guston’s style of figurative abstraction. Han develops his style out of a desire to “destroy” painting, which is a language born from the process of questioning painting in terms of its merits and necessity. Han is validly investigating the question of what an authentic posture or mindset for a painter is. To an artist, creative freedom is paramount, but the necessity of creating endlessly may feel forced or unnecessary; thus, Han rebels against the idea and the necessity of painting itself, earnestly questioning why he must paint and violently engaging in the creative destruction on the canvas, daily.
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Herok’s “Field” (2025) is a conceptually driven painting, which utilizes data of the artist’s movements on the field while he is playing soccer. Letting go of the artist’s autonomy and exercise of will on the canvas, Herok invites to the picture plane an energetic accumulation of abstract associations and relationships that may appear “random” on the surface. Placed unconventionally on the edge of the gallery wall and the floor, the work acknowledges that it is a data-driven simulation of a real event that happened on a smaller scale, at the level of toy soldiers. The imaginary miniature soccer players, who are about the size of a person’s palm, could walk right into the field and re-enact the movements and passes of the game, which are now represented as an abstract conglomeration of lines.
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“Ppeace 02” (2023) by Ahyun Jeon abstracts the appendages and the joints of a bird or a human into generous masses that metaphorically become a landmass or an island below and a crimson sky above. A finely and realistically rendered fly sits on this leg, which is a homophone to the city Paris when articulated in Korean. Why does the work’s title, which points to the word “peace,” begin with two P’s? This invented word may suggest the sound of the fly as it flies in the air while making the high-pitched buzzing sound. The way in which the artist places the unpleasant symbol or image of a fly onto the fleshy mass suggests a psychological play with the theme of mortal nature, fleshly limitations, and the translatable nature of the body as food (for other beings). Jeon’s work reminds us of Salvador Dali’s 1933 Surrealist sculpture on view at the MoMA titled, “Retrospective Bust of a Woman,” but her work is uniquely positioned as a painting made from an Asian woman’s perspective.
Sangho Han, untitled, 2021.acrylic and pencil on paper
Yerang Moon’s “Zoomed In” (2025) suggests a zoomed-in view of a larger object or structure and the link between reality and abstraction. It has been said that any realistic painting is abstract at its core, and it is possible to crop into a photo and enlarge the crop to produce an abstract image. The painting, which consists of sand and acrylic on wood panel, has a highly graphical quality in certain places and high contrast overall that suggests moments of chiaroscuro for a representational painting, with the qualities of a Renaissance or a Baroque painting. Similar to the works of Abstract Expressionism by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, there is no center to the image, and it should be no accident that Eastern philosophies that the Abstract Expressionists studied often denied the idea of self, center, or core truth, unlike the Western philosophical traditions up to Modernism (or prior to Post-Modernism). At a literal level, the work may be representing the texture of a zoomed-in wooden surface verbatim, but on a symbolic level it becomes a tragic detonation of a car or the people of the Middle East or Ukraine. The image captures the violence (as permitted in life) in terms of its dynamic and explosive energy and the extreme brevity of the moment that ends exactly as it has begun. The artist allows us to understand and comprehend an event that is highly incomprehensible without the filter of the artwork due to the nature of the event exhibiting extreme violence and the infinitely short time scale. The style of the work could be described as Neo-Graphic Abstract Expressionism, as the work has a sort of graphic quality with flat shapes rendered with high contrast and cartoon-like energy.
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​In Western painting, the binary has persisted between the illustrational versus painterly, the surface versus the core, illusion versus truth, and desire versus reality. As Western philosophy posits that what is on the surface is not the core, the traditional hierarchy of western art conceives of painting as different from and superior to illustration; in other words, illustration is understood as an image that sits on the surface, while painting is described as an endeavor that has the power to capture the core of the subject. For contemporary painters, this is the centuries-old question of what is painterly and what is illustrational. Should the two be separate and unequal, separate but equal, combined but unequal, or combined and equal for the artist? Does illustration have a chance to surpass painting, or were the two never as separate from one another as the dominant doctrines of art have envisioned? These questions have not been fully resolved (and probably never will).
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Woosik Choi’s works – “Float” (2023) and “Soft Landing” (2023) – we come a full circle from the painterly explorations of the other artists to a more illustrational style. Choi’s style the free and whimsical qualities of the lines, and details that contribute to de-skilling of sorts that is “easy” to look at and “enjoy.” In both works, a figure floats into the scene from above, hanging onto a daisy flower or a parachute glider. Below lies a home in a lush blue forest and mountainous islands appear in the sea, in “Float” and “Soft Landing” respectively. A peaceful and idyllic romanticism or sentimentality emerges within the viewer’s mind due to the painting’s illustrational and innocent qualities. The works may reflect the artist’s longing for home as he has studied and worked in a likely hostile and foreign environment. The images are the temporary resting place for the soul of a traveler that has seen and gone through a great deal. What masks a juvenile illustration is an existential outlook and a philosophy built on experiences of hardship and suffering.
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What we ultimately see in Choi’s works is a conversion and a translation – the flip between painting and illustration, surface and the core, illusion and the truth, and desire and reality. The artist, after having studied art history and the dominant paradigms of modern and contemporary art, has settled for this unique illustrational style and voice that rings true to him. The king is not a king, the servant is not a servant; rather, the lion is the rabbit, and the sheep is in fact the tiger. This flip reflects a democratic ideal that we are all created equally and that we should love one another and treat each other with mutual respect. Love and self-acceptance should be the guiding ideal for every human being, not the madness for money and capitalistic gains that drive the world insane and leads to environmental destruction, greater human suffering, and societal fracturing.
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What we sense from Choi’s work is a life philosophy of a young South Korean person who bought into the illusion of competition that is used to justify the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities but now rejects that kind of competitive mentality. Choi’s work reveals a kind of release and a letting-go. The artist must have studied long hours every day in Hagwons (which are after-school study and private tutoring programs) in middle and high school, was accepted to a top college, and arrived in New York, where he obtained his MFA degree. Now looking back, Choi ultimately let go of everything – the high level of rigor and grandiose ambitions, overthinking and stress, and pretension and complexity. Through this body of work, which is poetic, illustrational, and dreamlike, the artist distances himself from what was originally understood as authentic and painterly. Choi embraces the opposite of what was originally supreme and held in high regard, just as Buddha went the other way from the worldly desires that entrap and enslave all (or most) people, preventing them from reaching the nirvana (or the enlightened state). The wanted is no longer wanted, and there are too many winners (winning in or playing the same game). In Choi’s path, however, the underdog becomes the king, and the lone turtle triumphs in the race over the numerous rabbits… by being slow and idyllic in his style, not fast and cunning.
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At first, we were not so sure whose vision for the future of painting is the most likely or worthy, and the group exhibition appeared randomly accumulated, as the word, “stochastic,” suggests in the title. It is only when one begins to read into the show and tries to make sense of this random drift that a pattern slowly emerges. Perhaps what we need is not the hyper-intellectual or the super-technical, and we might need a bit of letting go of the desire to “win” in the gamified world and human existence. Sometimes the real winners are the ones like Choi, whose work encapsulates the core spirit or conclusion of the dialogue that the artists originating from South Korea have engaged with regarding painting throughout this exhibition. Choi’s work represents a simple turn from the values traditionally associated with painterly, truth, core, reality, and the good. The good is relative, subjective, and contextual: this generation may be weary of the ideology of supremacy (of painting) and find the (illustrational) act of letting go and equality on the surface more enticing. In that sense, there is a flip or a reversal in the body of questions and answers that painters (and illustrators) have sought regarding the essence and the nature of painting versus illustration in relation to truth and illusion. In Choi’s work, we realize that we can take a step back, take a sip of tea, relax, and breathe slowly. Only then can we break the illusion of inequality and step out of the cave into the full light of spiritual reality and liberation.
Woosik Choi.Soft Landing.2023