Chun Kyung-ja established a unique style of the traditional chaesaekhwa [oriental color painting]. While employing orthodox methods that also shed the fetters of formal traditionalism, Chun experimented with various configurations to create her own unique painting style. As part of this process, Chun incorporated western oil painting techniques in the use of oriental painting materials, and built up her distinctively stylistic manner in oriental color painting by creating homogenous surfaces through the overlapping of colors. Her paintings are more meaningful as unique creations of an individual artist rather than a continuation of the legacy of the chaesaekhwa style. While Chun’s works were initially more detailed and realistic at the time of her graduation from college, their forms and colors eventually began to symbolically reflect Chun’s own emotions and sentiments starting in the early 1950s. The autobiographical elements became more noticeable in Chun's works from the early 1960s, which featured families and women surrounded in flamboyant flowers. The particular theme of “women and flowers” began to dominate her works, featuring free-spirited composition and fantastical scenes. Starting in the early 1970s, Chun began producing portraits of women in full swing. Her work Gillye Sister in 1973 marked the beginning of her unique style of women portraits, wherein the subjects with their white pupils stare pensively into the air. In the mid-1970s, Chun began to introduce symbolism in her works based on the themes “autobiographic women portraits,” and “transcendental women portraits”, which sprung from a sense of solitude, or han [loosely translatable as deep-seated grief], and her internal world. The most important feature in Chun’s portraits of women is the eyes, through which Chun tried to express her inner world. Starting in the 1980s, most of Chun’s autobiographical portraits began to feature exotic materials and icons recomposed on the paintings to represent Chun's own life. The golden pupils and transcendental images of women based on the ancient Egyptian view on the afterlife continued as the visual formal language in Chun’s paintings into the 1990s. <Invocation of the Spirit of the Dead>(1965) depicts a shamanistic ritual at sea. The composition of the work takes three vertically stacked sections. At the very top is an apparition of a demon-like woman, whose body clad in a colorful wonsam gown swirls into a leviathan writhing violently like a storm into the sea to create a dynamic scene. In the middle is a legendary boat setting sail to a distant land. Deep in the sea is the leviathan’s head, baring its fangs as it prepares to ascend into the heavens like a dragon. In her pursuit of depicting a more traditional Korean theme, Chun turned to the color schemes of the Joseon era wonsam [wedding gown] and shamanism. With Invocation of the Spirit of the Dead, Chun began to use the three primary colors of red, blue, and yellow as the main colors in her works. The appropriate use of brightness and saturation in this work presents a harmonious complementary contrast. The modern composition of traditionally oriental themes and colors works in concert with the spiritual expression of the painting to present a dreamy ambience to distinctly highlight the unique nature of this work.

Chun Kyung-ja (1924-2015) graduated from Women’s School of Fine Arts, Tokyo [presently Joshibi University of Art and Design] in 1943. From 1954 to 1974, Chun served as an art professor at Hongik University, and on the steering committee of the National Art Exhibition. She also chaired the National Art Exhibition's subcommittee and served as a judge, as well as a member of the National Academy of Arts. Starting with the solo shown hosted at the Jeonnam Girls’ High School auditorium in 1946, Chun has held 20 solo exhibitions including the final Chun Kyung-ja Retrospective (Hoam Gallery) in 1995. From 1955 to 1981, Chun participated in over 60 group exhibitions including the Malaysia Government Invitational Exhibition in 1967, 10th Sao Paulo Art Biennial in 1969, the Contemporary Korean Oriental Paintings Tour in Europe in 1977, as well as other numerous National Art Exhibitions and invitational exhibitions. Chun was also an active writer, publishing 18 volumes of works including the Drawing of a Woman in 1955, the autobiographical The 49th Page of My Sorrowful Legend in 1979, as well as other travel essays and artist’s journals. Chun was a recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Award at the Korean Art Association Exhibition, the Seoul Cultural Award in 1971, the Samil Foundation Award in 1975, the National Academy of Arts Award in 1979, and Eungwan Order of Cultural Merit, the second highest class in 1983, and was also selected as one of “the greatest Korean artists of the 20th century” by the Korea Art Critics Association in 1999.