Artist Being half-Chinese and half-British and raised in North Wales, Choichun’s early development was founded by Celtic culture externally with an Asian home life internally. She graduated with a degree in metal-smithing from the Loughborough College of Art in the U.K before moving to London and then to China in 1990. She studied Buddhist iconography in both Beijing and the Yangung Caves in Shanxi province on the Mongolian/Chinese border before working in Hong Kong for two years as a background artist for animation film. Choichun moved back to London in 1992 ,and was bestowed a grant from the Prince of Wales’ Youth Business Trust where she began a small business creating traditional Asian paper products featuring her personal iconography. She was selected by the Prince of Wales Business Trust for ‘most innovitive business’ award the following year. Her focus on painting coincided with her relocation to New York in 1994 where she began working as an assistant to artist Peter Max. Choichun currently resides in Brooklyn, selling privately to clients in Europe, Asia and the US.

Statement "Lives are as rich as memories, but what of lives where memories have been lost from time or clouded from trauma?”

Emerging through the subconscious avenues of dreams, flashbacks, and recorded deja vu, my painting is an autobiographical investigation of the relationship between my past and present, reality and illusion. Like Rorschach tests in reverse, it is often an attempt to provide clues to what I may not be fully aware of in myself. What results are simply traces of that activity, though void of any intended meaning, for the viewer. The paintings can be pure expressions of style or conflicted excavations with patterns of what may be hidden or imagined. The lines emerge as a non-cognitive language to me and often form a pictographic alphabet; a cryptic graffiti where 'glyphs' document the days, weeks or months spent on a piece.

Process Choichun never paints from sketches but instead allows the process and medium dictate. Each application is an expressive gesture evoking the emotion and inner psychology of the moment. Each painting goes through its own non-finite changes until reaching completion, which is a subjective determination at the time.
Choichun has constantly evolved her image and technique – painting on wood panels and canvas, using liquid acrylic, aerosol, oil bars and thread, and application with sticks, brushes, trowels and vessels: Applying paint and then scratching through layers to reveal what is underneath, scripting with ‘glyphs’ throughout, painting over, discovering a 'surface', repeating, and so on, until whichever energies emerge reach a conclusion.

©2008 Choichun Leung. All Rights Reserved