RAINBOW 2007 - Review
The structure that Choi Soo-jung build up in her paintings
Power Ekroth, Swedish Curator, 2007
What at first might strike one as a link to the surreal in Soo-jung Choi’s paintings is deceiving. There are absolute deliberate and conscious choices behind every part of her work. She “cuts” out lived bits and fragments from her own environment and surroundings with everyday objects, events or situations that occur close by her in her life that she in turn frame and put together into the new context of her paintings and other work. The works represent a totally new context for the fragmented pieces which in turn provide an experienced reality for the spectator to dwell upon in a “maze” or rebus. The structure that she builds up in her compositions points in many different directions which don’t necessarily add up to a coherent image for the spectator, but it is a structure of Choi’s own. It would be deceitful to believe that there are any inconsistencies in her painting due to the deconstructed and reconstructed image. There are no random acts of temporary gatherings of her “bricks” or “frames” that she uses to build up the works with, these are instead intended markers to trivial things in our life that also are markers to something that are important cornerstones of the vary same life.
The use of the word “frame” is here is also deliberate; the relation between one of her paintings and a film is easily discerned. The frames where a particular object or a certain situation is singled out, freezed and placed into a specific new context make up a new narrative based upon the imagination of both the artist and the onlooker. Hence, that she mentions film directors like Jean Luc Godard, Jim Jarmusch or David Lyncj as inspirational for her comes as no surprise. The maze the draws are coded by recurrent markers, Markers here could be faceless people, cartoon figures, animals of different kinds sort of cut’ n’ pasted into the paintings. One such marker she makes use of in several of her work is the black and yellow cone, the one you see on the street that in turn marks out an area of potential danger it may be a pot hole in the street or just as very well a restricted area due to other kinds of dangers. This colour code of yellow and black signals danger even in nature, just think about the body of the wasp. What is the danger that the cone signal in her work? The cone appears not only in the paintings but also as a sculpture, but then partially “melted” down, where the melted part creates a “puddle” of cone-ness. What happens if one was about to step into the puddle? In my own imagination it is a veritable rabbit hole the sort of rabbit hole that Alice in Wonderland fell through. The cone appears to be dangerous in it-self.
The limit of our imagination is researched in her paintings, what can art do and how can we make sense out of the reality that makes both sense and nonsense? In this respect Choi’s artwork presents a potential map to her own reality. Choi herself says about her art quite illustratively: “My artwork (especially the painting) is to me a question mark and an endless quotation about the world around me. So, I would continue to let my audience question, providing them with an onlooker’s trivial questions about the context.”
