Mustard Seed Garden Grave
When I asked Choe Sooryun for materials in preparation for a text about her upcoming solo exhibition, she sent me a file titled Threefold Translation, containing classical Chinese tales of the strange (zhiguai) in their original Chinese, alongside her own literal translations into English and Korean. These stories would appear in her new works. Reading them for the first time, I was struck by their unfamiliar narrative structures, abrupt endings, and the fluid boundaries between the living and the dead. Yet they also evoked a curious familiarity with Korean folk tales and legends.
Choe later showed me a painting incorporating one of these stories. It brought together the original Chinese text, a Korean transcription with readings and annotations, and images loosely evoking the narrative. Three elements stood out: the prominent presence of text, the figurative images that resisted specific identification, and the composition of a handwritten transcription framed within the larger painting.
Having read the stories beforehand, I initially tried to identify the text in the painting. Yet as I followed the Korean characters, my attention gradually shifted from their meaning to their visual qualities. Unlike a document or book, Choe's writing resists straightforward reading. The colors, rhythms, and movements of the characters become increasingly apparent: traces of repeated writing and erasure, neatly formed Korean script, fluorescent marks indicating pronunciations, and images flowing alongside the text.
In Choe's paintings, text does more than communicate a story. It sets the entire composition in motion, functioning simultaneously as a sign and as painting itself. As writing slips away from comprehension and emerges as an image, the viewer experiences a continuous movement between legibility and obscurity, as though repeatedly bringing an indistinct object into and out of focus.
The images themselves are equally elusive. Willows, peach trees, and lotus flowers evoke familiar notions of China and East Asia without referring to any particular narrative. Rendered with blurred contours reminiscent of an old television image disrupted by static, they resist clear identification. Background patterns, paper creases, sketches, and written characters overlap without establishing a stable visual hierarchy. Rather than depicting actual objects or illustrating specific stories, these forms seem to suggest an unseen world in which conventional ideas of the East, tradition, narrative, and painting begin to dissolve. Fixed categories and logical distinctions loosen, allowing images and meanings to drift freely.
Within the painted surface, Choe introduces another frame resembling a page transcribed from a zhiguai tale. This act of copying brings to mind the concept of the palimpsest, as developed by the French literary critic Gérard Genette. Originally referring to parchment reused for new writing after an earlier text had been erased, the term describes how an existing work can generate another through transformation or imitation. The original is never entirely lost; its traces persist beneath new layers of meaning.
Choe's paintings similarly preserve the ancient stories while transforming them into contemporary visual experiences. Chinese literary texts become images displayed on gallery walls, crossing boundaries between writing and painting, fiction and reality, tradition and the present. Korean translations, phonetic annotations, and overlapping patterns further complicate the relationship between the original narratives and the artist's pictorial language. Her compositions establish a palimpsestic condition in which transcription becomes creation, and inherited texts acquire new visual and conceptual meanings.
This condition also echoes the world of zhiguai tales, where humans and ghosts, reality and unreality, coexist without clearly defined boundaries. Choe's paintings likewise refuse fixed distinctions. Writing becomes image, recognizable forms dissolve into ambiguous impressions, and ancient stories reappear as contemporary paintings. Through these shifts between visibility and invisibility, comprehension and sensation, her works inhabit a space that is both uncanny and beautiful.
Among the zhiguai tales Choe sent me, “Strange Song of Nie Bao” contains the phrase “The events are strange, and the words uncanny.” These words seem particularly fitting for the unfamiliar sensory territory her paintings explore. Choe is currently preparing a book of the zhiguai tales she has retranslated.