Space is not enough
-Christiane Opitz
On Soo Jung Choi’s exhibition No Man’s Land
The space seems bigger than its actual dimensions: much bigger than is conceivable for an area delimited by architecture with walls, floor and ceiling. It grows beyond itself, opening up and apparently leaving all restrictions behind. In Soo Jung Choi’s exhibition in the Künstlerhaus, the walls become transparent surfaces and the viewer believes that he can see right through them. On each of two areas of wall, facing one another, the artist has hung a large-format painting on canvas. Both works from her cycle Treasure Island (Bait I and Bait II, 2010) show all kinds of objects floating in black space, converging towards the centre of the picture. Here, one can see mysterious patterns and structures, flowers, shoes, balls, animals, mushroom-like growths and figures. Their flashy colours make them stand out in the dark, starry sky as if they themselves were planets, spaceships or remnants of a world that has long ceased to exist. Some of these things remain non-concrete, abstract, open to interpretation, while others are clear references, like the round-arched entry – a tiny detail in this work measuring two by two metres – that reveals a view through onto a tiled floor and cloistered walkway: here, Choi plays with a space-within-a-space phenomenon. After looking at the work for some time, it almost seems as if the hundreds of small objects were amassed in a ball of matter at the centre due to an increase in gravity, before being sucked into an imaginary black hole.
But the Korean artist is not satisfied with opening up the surface of the canvas by painterly means alone. Choi pierces the canvases of the Treasure Island pictures several times with needle and thread as well, so that – in addition to the painted details – parts of the surface are also inhabited by elaborately sewn textile clusters. It is also a physical matter, inasmuch as she perforates the canvas and so destroys the illusionary level of the image, penetrating into the “infinite depths” behind the painting. In addition – and here the fantastic ambivalence of Choi’s works becomes obvious – with this embroidery she also emphasises the flat surface and so draws our attention back from the distance into two-dimensionality.
The other pictures in the exhibition space, which the artist’s title defines as a No Man’s Land, are characterised by net-like structures rather than the converging agglomerations of Treasure Island. In the two-part work Floccinaucinihilipilification (Net 1 and Net 2, 2010), everyday objects also appear, not really matching the violet-white cloud structures in the background and thus suggestive of foreign bodies. There is an obvious accumulation of recurrent motifs – flowers, skeletons, birds, seats of all kinds, trees, harlequins and soldiers –, which appear at irregular intervals and therefore seem to follow a mysterious, mathematical logic. The fact that the figures are separated from their original context makes them empty, hollowed out, reduced to symbols and yet with no meaning at all. It is a deliberate strategy to eliminate everything that makes sense, and literally pull the rug (of interpretation) from under the viewer’s feet. The 32-year-old artist, who sees herself as the producer of visual systems rather than as a painter, does not reveal the sources of her ideas for paintings or explain how the objects function in relation to each other. She is prepared to admit that she has encountered many of the artefacts depicted in the paintings – vases, cases or statues, for example – in historical museums in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. They lend a deceptive stability to the dreamlike network of objects that is outlined in front of a vague sky; a stability suggested by the continuity of those icons produced by the hand of man.
The concept of the net that the artist spins here is exciting primarily because of its openness to interpretation. On the one hand, of course, the net is a means to capture something; it will let through objects of differing sizes according to the width of its mesh and so it functions as a filter or a sieve. But something always gets caught in it as well – after all, that is what it was invented for. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari investigated the network or root structure as a post-structural model. Their concept of rhizomatics has been incorporated into many discourses on the theory of science, media philosophy, and cultural science. To put it briefly, because the rhizome continually forms new ramifications – and has to be constantly re-knotted like a net as a result – dichotomies are no longer applicable as a means of explaining reality. There is tremendous potential, not only political, inherent in this. Not least, today “the Net” is a synonym of the Internet – that is, of global linking of information and communications, like the much-discussed “social networks” as well. The artist includes all these considerations in her work. But she is also fascinated by the semi-permeable structure of the net: as a delicate, airy construction that needs to be firm and stable but simultaneously open enough to capture its prey – perhaps animals, but maybe ideas, thoughts or philosophical deliberations as well. In the middle of the exhibition, therefore, there is a knotted net, the shadow contours of which are also projected onto the floor of the exhibition space by the fall of light. The additional title for her Treasure Island works, Bait, helps Choi to indicate that she is not concerned with romantic treasure seeking in her “no man’s land”, but with hunting – if not in a lethal sense. What she intends, far more, is a kind of metaphysical game that develops between the artist, the viewer and the work; a game about perception and the questioning of boundaries. Naturally, the latter theme also has political aspects in Choi’s work; after all, she is South Korean and grew up in a divided country.
Translated from the German by Lucinda Rennison
