2GIL29  GALLERY is pleased to present Canvas in the Wind, a solo exhibition by Insun Choi, Professor in the Department of Painting at Hongik University, on view from November 14 to December 19, 2026. Through fragments, uncertainty, absurdity, chance, and traces that escape the artist’s intentions, the exhibition explores the multifaceted possibilities of painting. Rather than following clear causal relationships or complete narratives, Choi’s paintings unfold as worlds in which repetition and stagnation, interruption and disjunction coexist. Forms remain fragmented rather than resolving into unified images; brushstrokes generate movement while simultaneously interrupting its flow; and repeated gestures appear to advance only to return to their point of departure. This painterly structure resonates with the world of the Theatre of the Absurd, particularly as evoked by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
In the play, the characters continue their conversations without fully understanding one another, and events seem to unfold without moving toward any clear direction. Repeated dialogue and actions sustain a state of stagnation rather than advancing time, leaving the narrative open to an ending that is never definitively established. A similar structure of repetition and interruption is transformed into a visual language in Choi’s paintings. The human body does not follow a continuous, natural form but breaks into planes at points such as the knees, while brushstrokes that seem poised to continue unexpectedly stop or change direction. Rather than conveying a single, unambiguous meaning, forms and gestures diverge and collide, establishing rhythms unique to each composition.
This fragmentation extends beyond a formal technique for dismantling images. It unsettles expectations of visual completeness and logical narrative, questioning whether painting must necessarily possess a clear beginning, development, and conclusion. Moving beyond the standardized conventions of mainstream art, Choi explores the possibility of painting generating its own internal order. For him, painting is not a means of reaching a predetermined destination but an ongoing act of inquiry directed toward something that may ultimately remain unattainable.
Just as the characters in Waiting for Godot cannot cease waiting, Choi’s paintings sustain a time of repetition and stagnation, deferring any definitive conclusion. In this context, incompleteness does not signify deficiency or failure. Rather, when meaning remains unfixed, a space opens in which new forms and sensations can emerge. By embracing uncertainty and imperfection as fundamental conditions of painting, Choi creates images that sustain questions rather than offer predetermined answers.
The exhibition title, Canvas in the Wind, originates in an actual experience in which a sudden gust caused a canvas standing on the artist’s terrace to sway back and forth. As Choi gazed at the canvas in preparation for beginning work, an unexpected gust pushed it forward and then backward, interrupting his process. Yet this interruption, which broke the continuity of his work and momentarily emptied his consciousness, became an occasion for new sensations and memories to surface. Memories of contemporary art books purchased at a bookstore on New York’s 57th Street in the 1990s overlapped with his present sensations, allowing past experiences to seep back into the work of the present.
Past and present, memory and sensation, do not connect through clear causal relationships. Instead, they meet through chance associations and the movement of perception. At this moment, wind becomes more than a natural phenomenon: it acts as a force that unsettles the artist’s consciousness and redirects the course of his work. Invisible yet capable of moving the canvas, awakening the senses, and summoning memories, the wind is both an event originating outside the painting and a catalyst for movement within it.
For Choi, wind is an elemental force of art, embracing fragments, chance, irrationality, absurdity, and division. It disrupts established orders, leads perception in unpredictable directions, and opens possibilities that deliberate planning alone cannot reach. In the wake of the wind, rather than deciding in advance what he intends to express, Choi explores how altered sensations and a shaken consciousness might find their way onto the canvas. The work resumes, but its point of departure is no longer the same as before the wind arrived.
The swaying canvas, the interruption of the working process, the resurgence of memory, and the transformation of sensation all become part of the creative process even before the painting itself begins. Painting, in this sense, is not limited to transferring an image already completed in the artist’s mind onto a surface. Instead, a painting takes shape through the interaction of unpredictable elements, including chance encounters with the external world, the intervention of memory, and the resistance of materials.
The title Canvas in the Wind encapsulates this approach. The canvas is not a passive surface that simply follows the artist’s intentions; it becomes a site that responds to external forces and material conditions, generating new traces through those interactions. The wind moves the canvas, the canvas unsettles the artist’s senses, and that disturbance becomes movement within the painting itself. Rather than following a predetermined course from beginning to end, the creative process is shaped by interruption and resumption, unexpected associations, and unforeseen transformations.
These sensations take concrete form in the artist’s working process, where material and bodily movement play an active role. At dusk, when the white surface of the canvas standing on the terrace no longer appears entirely white, Choi begins to make his marks. The sensations left by the wind on the skin and the movement of the swaying canvas cannot be reproduced literally on a flat surface. Rather than simply depicting these sensations, the artist engages the canvas through the material properties of paint, the movement of a palette knife, and the force exerted by his body.
Loading the knife with thick paint and thrusting it toward the surface as if throwing it creates a direct encounter between the artist’s intention and the physical conditions of the canvas. The tension of the canvas fabric, the viscosity of the paint, the angle and movement of the knife, and the force of the artist’s gesture all influence one another. Paint does not follow its intended trajectory exactly; points of impact deviate from their anticipated positions, and marks settle onto the surface in ways the artist could not have predetermined.
The artist’s intention remains present, but it does not determine the outcome entirely. Material is not wholly subordinate to the artist’s control; it asserts its own resistance and generates its own responses on the surface. At this point, painting shifts from the faithful execution of a preconceived image into an event in which intention and material interact to produce new outcomes. The artist seeks to control the image while simultaneously confronting elements beyond his control.
A gesture that misses its intended mark might initially be regarded as a failure, yet the resulting deviation can reveal forms and energies that would never have emerged within the original plan. It is within this paradox that Choi’s notion of the “success of failure” takes shape. When the desire to achieve a successful single gesture encounters the resistance of the material, the unintended result becomes not an error to be eliminated but the starting point of another possibility.
Rather than automatically correcting or erasing marks that depart from his intentions, Choi considers the relationships they establish and the movements they introduce into the composition. Failure does not remain merely a state of having fallen short of success. At times, an unsuccessful attempt opens a new direction, and an unintended result generates a more vivid sensation than the one originally envisioned.
Success, in this context, is redefined. It lies not in achieving a predetermined goal with precision, but in accepting an unpredictable outcome and transforming it into an integral part of the painting. The “success of failure” challenges the view that success and failure are mutually exclusive outcomes, revealing how they can intersect within a single creative process. It invites us to understand painting not as the product of perfect control, but as a process of encountering a world that cannot be fully controlled and allowing its interventions to become part of the work. At the point where the artist’s intention meets material resistance, and planned movements encounter accidental traces, painting acquires a vitality of its own.
The predominantly black-and-white works presented in this exhibition bring these painterly tensions into sharper visual focus. With the intervention of color restrained, the speed and weight of brushstrokes, the materiality of paint, the interruption of forms, and the spaces between them become more directly perceptible. The contrast between black and white extends beyond a simple visual distinction, foregrounding the tensions between trace and void, order and disorder, intention and chance.
By minimizing the emotional effects traditionally associated with color, Choi allows lines, planes, material density, and movement to emerge with greater clarity. Against the white ground, a dark mark may appear to establish a direction, yet that direction is continually unsettled through repetition and interruption. Accumulated paint lends weight to the surface, while empty spaces receive, interrupt, or counterbalance that weight, generating new rhythms. Forms appear and disappear in fragments rather than resolving into unified images, while brushstrokes simultaneously construct and dismantle the order of the composition.
These formal relationships suspend the impulse to interpret each work through a single, definitive meaning, directing the viewer’s attention toward the very process through which the painting takes shape. The traces left on the canvas are more than clues that explain a finished result. Each one bears the imprint of the artist’s movement, the response of the material, and the moment when intention and chance intersected. The meaning of the image continues to shift according to the relationships formed among these traces.
Within the restricted visual conditions of black and white, subtle differences and collisions further emphasize the materiality and performative nature of painting. The tensions between line and plane, density and emptiness, figure and non-figure transform the canvas from a fixed image into a field of ongoing formation. Before the works, viewers are invited to look beyond what is depicted and consider what forces produced a particular gesture, why a form breaks off at a specific point, and how an unintended mark establishes relationships with the rest of the composition.
The paintings do not prescribe a single interpretation as the correct one. Instead, they leave room for different perspectives and experiences, revealing painting as both an object that conveys meaning and a process through which meaning comes into being.
Canvas in the Wind asks not only what painting represents, but how painting comes into being and what it makes possible. The repetition and stagnation of absurdist theatre, the unexpected intervention of the wind, the resistance of materials, and traces that escape the artist’s intentions all unsettle the boundaries of fixed forms and completed meanings. Choi does not regard uncertainty as something to be overcome or eliminated; he embraces it as an integral part of the creative process.
In his paintings, repetition is not merely stagnation, interruption is not a failure of form, and unintended marks are not flaws that diminish the work’s completion. Each becomes a condition through which new relationships and movements can emerge on the surface. Like a canvas swaying in the wind, his paintings move between the artist’s intentions and external forces, planning and chance, order and disorder. Rather than arriving at a definitive conclusion, they remain in a state of continual transformation and becoming.
Through this process, painting renews its possibilities instead of progressing toward a fixed meaning. What emerges amid fragments and uncertainty is neither a predetermined answer nor a completed narrative, but the new possibilities of painting revealed in the moment when intention and chance intersect.
Ultimately, Canvas in the Wind embodies the artist’s encounter with a world beyond his control and reveals how painting acquires a vitality of its own through that encounter. The wind moves the canvas; that movement transforms perception; and perception, in turn, leaves unpredictable traces on the surface. Through a state of incompletion, the work opens up the possibility of continuous creation.
Following the gestures and material traces across the black-and-white surfaces, viewers encounter painting as something continually born and transformed between intention and chance. Rather than offering a definitive answer, Choi’s paintings remain open to possibility, like a canvas that continues to sway and move long after the wind has passed.