All regards one's own love to be pure and exceptional, but the very dawning of it demonstrates a rather unforeseen or accidental property. Furthermore, it is not easy to deliberately withdraw that love—whatever reason its start derived from. Perhaps love holds back and molds everything to an utterly disparate being by shattering it once initiated, as can be sensed from Jean Luc Nancy's phrase, 'One kiss breaks open a fissure in existence'.
Departing from a curiosity over the figure of one's own intact love, Choi's work can be chiefly sorted into two forms: one, a work that visualized text as its subject matter; the other, a work as an imaging of love's ulterior contour. The seventeen text works displayed at the three floors of the exhibition are utterly composed of texts delineating love, extracted from song lyrics. Lyrics of national anthems, military songs, hymns, and pop songs are replete with matters of pledges and promises, love-hate and sympathy towards the beloved. These songs are sung over and over, transcending the boundary of era and generation. The lyrics become a language spoiled and polluted in proportion with the times of which the love songs are sung, displaying their repetitive attribute rooting from their eternal usage as the mean to confess one's 'own' purity.
A quite divergent grain can be noticed from Choi's image works constituting the other axis of the exhibition. Pieta (2020) appropriates the image of Michelangelo's sculpture that is counted as one of his three masterpieces. Again, Pieta is fragmented into half tone dots after being divided into 120 pieces then reconstituted. This work synchronously serves the roles of displaying the fractured and wide-open chasm of the half tone technique and accommodating the fissure of existence, corroded and penetrated.
The image of the sea, Perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other (2020) is in the form of a triptych. The image of the sea in this work is not split into three screens but rather exists as three disparate figures of the sea, each subtly distinct from one another. Cited from Nietzsche's letter sent to Wagner connoting his cessation of friendship, the title of this work is the very sentence written at the moment Nietzsche spontaneously strived to put an end to their philos-relationship which enabled them to share an insatiable gap. The letter was sent despite Nietzsche's prior admission that his ideas came from Wagner, and from this sentence, one can sense how distressing it is to break off from the scope of love by one's own will. Imperatively in oblivion than in reminiscence, the fractured sea appears to some like a brutal question about the insurmountable distance—analogous to Nietzsche's cold-bloodedness in his attempt to reach the state of in-cognition at an accidental encounter.
Choi's Better than Future (2020) is an arrangement of sixteen images, produced through the method of "Draw drawing". This method tosses a magnet upon an iron plate like dice then rounds out the work with the magnet attached as it is. In the context of the story, it falls into a similar category to another work, Creation of God (2020). The image, borrowing part of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling murals, has irreverently changed God's right hand to left and Adam's left to right. Both forms are similar to the way of weaving tales of constellations in between fortuitous formations and consistent traces. Double peaks (2020), which are looked so far, have views of mountain climbing up and down on each panel, but we see no big difference. The silent peaks, however, are simply asking for what we are heading for peaks within numerous challenges of life. As such, Choi's solo exhibition One Kiss is double and triple overlapped, encompassing the traces of love for creation and extinction from accidental connection.
Press release courtesy ONE AND J. Gallery.
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