-PLAYGOING 2005 -
On the image on an image
Lee Eun_ju, Curator, Brain Factory
The work of Choi Soo_jung tells about how the image produced in the consumer society exist, Reusing graphical colors, compositions and images adopted from the mass media, she often reveals the sentiment of the age where images are floating as buoys. In this exhibition, she arranges various visual data which is derived from or reminds us of the image of Liberty Leading the People of Delacroix. For example, she accepts the image from the large-sized advertisement poster commemorating the National Liberation Day where people are gathering around women activists, including Yu Gwan-sun, which is overlapped with the Liberty Leading the people in Delacroix’s picture. A documentary photo of AP agency standing along with this image features a woman who is dancing with her hands up to the sky among demonstrators against U.S. President Bush in Copenhagen.
Though it is a photo that catches the actual event, Choi Soo_jung reproduces it as if it were a painted picture with visual effect in mixtures of images. The most essential truth of the actual event is edited into a frame reflecting the attributes of the medium and is changed into an artificial image maximizing only a fragment of the events. In addition, it forms arbitrary fantasy indifferent of the original purpose in the system of the receiver.
The imposing and beautiful appearance of the woman among the fiery background in the documentary photo is harmonized with the picturesque and dramatic effects of “the Goddess of Liberty” of Delacroix, and provides visual information similar to the effects. An objective fact is melted and penetrated into the context of fictional image. The video shooting frantic spectators in a concert and the heated theater is also sucked into this context and is read similarly. Choi Soo-jung speaks of the role of a visual artist living in reality that is filled with excessive image information through these works. Various locations where Delacroix’s picture and documentary photos are found are drawn in the canvas, centered among these references. The places represent the creative space of the author’s own, where various phases of image fragments encounter each other.
In the work of Choi Soo-jung, which unveil the complicated aspects of the images such as pictures, copied materials and paintings, we can feel a certain conspiracy of a sinister system feeling in the daily live stuffed with the images of consumer society, or a cold smile at the disorientation, or the amusement of an image consumer enjoying the saturation of images. These attributes disclose the post-pop element reflecting the cultural phenomenon of the post consumer capitalist society. Choi Soo-jung speaks of the limitless thickness of the image existing between reality and fiction by creating a fantasy for the image of the consumer society like a black comedy. Therefore, she finds her own identity as a person making poetic fiction among the multi-phased hypertexts and the multiplication of inauthentic images.
