Harper’s is pleased to announce Tethered, Untethered, Hyegyeong Choi’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new work by the Brooklyn-based artist. The exhibition opens Tuesday, May 12, from 6–8 pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Throughout this presentation, Choi’s signature technicolor figures vacillate between hunter and hunted. Some are literally tethered—bound by ropes or strands of hair—while others are metaphorically ensnared, consumed by their obsessions and pursuits. Drawing on the primal task of hunting, Choi examines shifting dynamics of power, desire, and survival. Each composition frames the hunt as a focused pursuit that sharpens perception and intent. Yet this heightened attention also introduces instability: the hunter may at any moment become the hunted, made vulnerable as the balance of power shifts. It is within this potential for roles to collapse that Choi situates her work, exploring what it means to exist within these fluid conditions between control and release.
Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare references its namesake painting by Gustave Courbet (1857). In Courbet’s original, two hounds face off beside a lifeless hare, capturing the dissipation of the fragile calm immediately following the kill. With their human masters absent, tension resurfaces as dominance is renegotiated. Choi reimagines this composition with her characteristic humanoid figures while maintaining the charged standoff—a reminder that the struggle for control does not end once the prey is captured; rather, the target shifts and the contest for dominance persists.
Elaborating upon this transitional moment between “hunter” and “hunted” as a broader process of becoming, Choi’s subjects are either boldly enunciated or recede into their surroundings. In Chasing Birds, two hunters in vibrant royal blue kneel before their prize, honing the viewer’s attention and eliciting sympathy for the hunted bird that lays between. Meanwhile, the figures in Venery and The Chased and The Chosen are more subtly carved from reduced palettes, their complex scenes referencing Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (c.1556–59), in which the hunter Actaeon comes upon the goddess Diana bathing with her nymphs. A later painting by Titian, The Death of Actaeon (c.1559–75), illustrates Actaeon’s fate, as a furious Diana transforms him into a stag to be pursued by his own hounds. In Venery, Choi’s hunter is poised with both bow and paintbrush, aiming at an abstract canvas amid forms that become progressively indistinguishable from the painted surface. Here, Choi collapses the distance between hunter and prey, subject and environment, ultimately tethering and untethering the viewer within the same shifting field of perception that animates her work.
Across the exhibition, what begins as pursuit unravels into something less certain. Choi’s figures hover in the space where control is never fixed and release is never complete. For the artist, to move through these paintings is to be pulled into the same condition: slightly off-balance, burdened with the awareness that what is looked upon will beget self-reflection. In this way, Tethered, Untethered does not resolve so much as linger, leaving an uneasy sense that, alas, the hunt continues.
Hyegyeong Choi (b. 1986, Seoul, KR) received a BFA from Chung Ang University, Seoul, and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Choi’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at Harper’s, New York and Los Angeles (2024 and 2022); Brigitte Mulholland, Paris (2025); Carl Kostyál, London (2023); Shelter Gallery, New York (2021); Slow Gallery, Chicago (2020); and Stolbun Collection, New York and Chicago (2018 and 2015). Most recently, she has participated in group exhibitions at The Armory Show, New York (2025 and 2024); Jason Haam Gallery, Seoul (2025); David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2024); Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong (2024); Harper’s, New York, Los Angeles, and East Hampton (2024, 2023, and 2021); Pond Society, Shanghai (2023); Micki Meng/Parker Gallery, New York (2023); National Arts Club, New York (2023); and Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). Reviews of her work have appeared in Artforum, New York Times, and Hyperallergic. Choi lives and works in Brooklyn.