The Korean contemporary artist Wook-kyung Choi is the subject of a major retrospective titled Wook-kyung Choi, Alice’s Cat, which opens on October 27, 2021, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, Korea. Choi is known for her bold abstract paintings and works on paper which signaled a timely intercultural exchange between the United States and Korea. The exhibition title stems from the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), which left a profound influence on Choi’s artistic vocabulary. Presenting a tightly curated, comprehensive selection of approximately 200 works and ephemera, spanning early self-portraits from 1953 to later works created in 1985 before the artist’s untimely passing, Wook-kyung Choi, Alice’s Cat heralds Choi’s multifaceted talent as an artist, educator, and poet. 
 
The title of the exhibition—Wook-kyung Choi, Alice’s Cat—represents the explorations Choi undertook as an artist as she traveled back and forth from Korea and the United States after her first visit to the latter country in 1963. Simultaneously, it sheds light onto the artist’s commitment to literature—as a prolific poet, Choi published her English poems under the title Small Stones (1965) and 45 of her Korean poems (one of which included Alice’s Cat) under the title Like Unfamiliar Faces (1972) throughout her lifetime. 

The retrospective, which multilaterally reflects on Choi’s artistic language, is divided into four chronologically organized sections. The exhibition begins with ‘To America as Wonderland,’ featuring works created between 1963 and 1970, when the artist first became exposed to the latest shifts in American contemporary art and fully embraced these canons in her abstract and black-and-white paintings during her studies in the U.S. Between 1971 and 1978, Choi worked on large-scale abstract paintings while traveling between Korea and the U.S., showcased in the second section titled ‘Korea and America, In between Dream and Reality.’ ‘To the Mountains and Islands of Korea and the Home of Choi’s Painting’ presents Choi’s unique interpretation of Korean nature, which developed during her tenure as a professor at Yeungnam University and Duksung Women’s University upon her return to Korea in 1979. Choi’s self-portraits from the early 1950s to the 1970s constitute the final section, ‘Epilogue. Mirror Room: The Beginning of a New Story.’ The exhibition, which provides an opportunity to rediscover Choi as one of the leading figures of Korean abstract art, far beyond her existing reputation as a genius painter who died young, runs through February 13, 2022. Meanwhile, Choi’s works are also on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s special group exhibition, Women in Abstraction, through February 27, 2022.