Like a Poem She Never Wrote

CHOI&CHOI Cologne presents a group exhibition featuring five Korean women artists working across different parts of the world. Titled Like a Poem She Never Wrote, the exhibition delves into the unspoken narratives woven into each artist’s practice. Like a poem that exists only in the imagination, these works employ colour, form, materiality, and symbolism to articulate a visual language that transcends words.

Bringing together paintings and sculptures, the exhibition highlights each artist’s distinct voice and visual sensibility. The works give form to unnamed, unspoken symbols and invite viewers to engage with them, opening up new layers of meaning.

Jina Park (*1980), based in Berlin, draws on her personal experience of living between cultures. Her meticulous use of egg tempera creates surreal landscapes where memory, fantasy, and cultural fragments converge. Influenced by the non-linear perspectives found in East Asian painting traditions, Park constructs a “house of wonder” inhabited by exotic flora, fauna, and artefacts, interwoven with symbolic elements. Her compositions pose questions about cultural belonging, appropriation, and identity. Through repeated motifs of treasure, guardian, and thief, she encourages reflection on postcolonial power dynamics and Western perceptions of the ‘foreigner,’ opening space for multiple perspectives shaped by cultural difference.

Jukhee Kwon (*1981), based in Rome, transforms old and discarded books into delicate paper sculptures. With great care, she cuts, kneads, tears, and shapes the pages into flowing paper waterfalls, nests, cocoons, and abstract forms. These sculptures evoke a quiet poetic beauty and serve as meditations on impermanence, absence, and repetition. The printed characters on the aged pages acquire a new sense of temporality, as they are stripped of their original function and given renewed meaning. Kwon’s work reminds us that every ending carries the potential for a beginning, turning acts of destruction and decay into gestures of creation.
Stella Sujin (*1983), living and working in Paris, challenges fixed ideas of femininity and their associated visual codes – such as flowers, vulvas, and crimson-lipped portraits – through her expressive watercolours. By confronting deeply ingrained visual conventions, she creates unsettling images that merge symbolism, surrealism, myth, and reality. Her works, at times elegant and at other times grotesque, invite viewers to question the assumptions that shape our perceptions.

Sejin Hong (*1992), based in Seoul, creates work grounded in her lived experience as a hearing-impaired artist. Able to perceive only sounds above 95 decibels, she transforms this sensory limitation into the basis for a new aesthetic language, where absence becomes its own form of sensory experience. Her paintings juxtapose pastel-toned geometry and symmetry with organic curves and translucent, veil-like surfaces, giving form to a deeply personal sensorial world.

Sojeong Lee (*1993), living and working in Düsseldorf, translates her dreams and nightmares into rich symbolic imagery. Influenced by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, she delicately captures emotional states such as loneliness and alienation in paint. Everyday objects like paper planes and raincoats take on new symbolic meaning, blending with figures that seem to drift between dream and reality, and imbuing her canvases with a unique emotional charge.