Choi Myoung Young

Choi Myoung Young was born on September 23, 1941, in Haeju, Hwanghae-do, in what is now North Korea. His family relocated south, and he spent part of his childhood in Gunsan and Incheon before beginning formal art study in 1957 under the artist Chung Sanghwa. He graduated from Incheon National Normal School in 1960, then entered the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University in Seoul, earning a BFA in painting in 1964 and, a decade later, an MFA from the university's graduate school in 1974.

He was among the founding members of the Origin Painting Association in the early 1960s, a group central to the development of Korean abstraction, and in the early 1970s he joined the Korea Avant-Garde Association, known as A.G. His mature practice, built around what he has called the Conditional Planes series, developed from a working method of repeated, disciplined brushwork applied in dense grids, a language closely associated with the broader Dansaekhwa movement of Park Seo-Bo, Yun Hyong-keun, and Lee Ufan. His first solo exhibition was held at Seoul Gallery in 1976. He represented Korea internationally at the 5th Paris Biennale in 1967 and the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1969.

Choi taught painting at Hongik University from 1975 to 2007, served as an exchange professor at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom from 1990 to 1991, and has held the title of Professor Emeritus at Hongik University since 2007. He lives and works in Seoul.

Choi is consistently described in gallery and institutional texts as one of the founding figures of Dansaekhwa and a central presence in the history of Korean modern art. That standing was reinforced by his inclusion in the 2012 survey Dansaekhwa: Korean Monochrome Painting at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, and by ORIGIN, a 2016 exhibition at Galerie Perrotin in Paris that reunited him with fellow Origin Painting Association founders Suh Seung-won and Lee Seung-jio. No verbatim review from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; available English-language commentary comes from gallery and curatorial texts rather than signed press criticism.

Choi's auction market has historically been small and concentrated in Korea, but it has grown internationally in recent years. His current auction record is USD 119,700 for Conditional Planes 19-1015 (2019), set at Christie's New York on March 18, 2025, in a sale of Japanese and Korean art. That result surpassed his previous high of USD 109,300 for Sign of Equality 75-05 (1975), set at Seoul Auction on November 23, 2021, by roughly 9 percent. In 2023, Almine Rech began representing him across Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Asia, staging his exhibition Conditional Planes in Paris; he continues to be presented in Korea by The Page Gallery, including at TEFAF New York in 2025.

Choi's auction record is recent and thin: his current high was only set in March 2025, and the pool of comparable public sales remains small relative to better-known Dansaekhwa peers. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication rest on his representing galleries and his own studio. For a collector, his deepening representation by Almine Rech and continued presence with The Page Gallery are the clearest signals of an expanding international market, while the limited number of prior sales is the main reason to treat any single auction result with caution.