Claire (Won Jeong) Chey (b.1997) is a Seoul-born painter. She received a BA in Fine Arts and Gender Studies from UCLA in 2019 before moving back to Korea. Over the past four years, Chey has expanded her practice in Seoul, holding numerous solo and group exhibitions at various spaces, including Humor Garmgot Gallery, Gallery Nonbut, and Punto Blu. Additionally, she participated in the 2021 Gwangju Biennale as a guest lecturer for Ad Minoliti’s “Feminist School of Painting'' workshop and was an active member of the local feminist artist collective, “the Buraza Collective,” for three years. Currently, Chey is attending the Yale University School of Art’s graduate painting program.



Claire Chey claimed herself as a metaphorical painter. In the process of making art work, the paint becomes part of her body and she depicts the brush acts as a witch’s broomstick stripping her flesh to be daubed onto the canvas, and as a housewife’s duster that uncovers the ornate patterns carved on the surfaces of her furniture. The paintings in a sense is an act of creation and discovery to Claire and the viewing of her artwork would equal doing a bloodstain analysis of the crime.

Claire’s artwork is full of visual metaphors in woman which the elaborate and omnipresent patterns carved onto our culture. What Claire values in those metaphors is that they offer an insight into the principles of the society, and see them as by-products of reality. Investigating the objects that symbolise our bodies revealing our value in relation to others. It explains the normalisation of objectifying certain bodies - the weak and womanly ones. Claire claims that all the human being are all made up of holes; the bodily openings that connect us to the world, make us vulnerable and yet keep us alive. We consume everything we face in our lives through these orifices, including the remnants of the metaphors. In doing so, we often become the objects that we are equated with, as we are constantly penetrated.

Claire is currently studying painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art.