Thinner Happy

Hyegyeong Choi

January 18-February 22, 2020

Ask someone if they’re happy, and rather than tallying their pleasure, they’re more likely to survey themselves for displeasure, for things lacking, for pain, for loss, for decline. The longer they deliberate, the less satisfied they are likely to feel. They find any degree of longing, suffering, something worse than it used to be, something they no longer have tips the scale into the “less” category.

Hyegyeong Choi paints impossible excess. She conjures opalescent shimmer in colors that should be dead flat matte. Bicycle tires ripple with cellulite as an excess of paint describes every inch. Color intensity defies any sense of natural color, highlight, or shadow, but there it is, describing. Glowing violet, nearly neon orange generating illusions of volume, depth, and ground. Corpulent women voracious for every sensation, every experience, dominate G’s hot tub party scenes. Phallus bouquets, cocktail glasses raised to the ceiling, and lewd dolphins flaunt contrapposto curves. Literal connections to bodies and body parts are transcended through a rainbow of genderless or supergendered characters so that all identity is endlessly fluid.

Superabundance exceeds expectations, it can surprise, it can reveal possibility. It also makes us heavy.

We avoid looking at our gratification strategies because they are hemmed up with regulations and limitations. Hyegyeong's paintings are a glorious mix of seeing something not imagined before and the terrible reality that the thing we desperately want, but think we are not supposed to want, or just can't have may turn out to be hideous, dangerous, or otherwise wildly disappointing.

Hyegyeong Choi, “Thinner Happy” at Slow, Chicago by Amanda Joy Calobrisi for ADF Web Magazine