JIMOK CHOI

A first step in understanding Jimok Choi’s afterimage series can be found in understanding the words quoted by Goethe in his Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810): “If the eye were not sunny, how could we perceive light? If God’s own strength lived not in us, how could we delight in Divine things?” Goethe was remarking on the limitations of Newton’s optics—which subordinated color to the physical properties of light—and arguing that the essence of color lay in the experience and perceptions of the physical organ exposed to light. A key aspect of the artist’s color composition and aesthetic structures rests in the concept of Nachbilder: complementary afterimages (red-green, blue-yellow) formed by the retina immediately after long exposure to a particular light source.

As the exhibition title suggests, Choi’s paintings are a form of pictorial archiving of complementary afterimages as his own retina’s visual response to experiencing the sun. The colorful phantom images that appear when one closes one’s eyes after viewing the sun directly manifest in complementary shades that are completely different from the original color; from there, they weaken before finally disappearing. The artist’s admission—“In the end, I am painting the world within my eyes”—indicates that the subject of his work lies in the random, unpredictable illusions that arise where light has disappeared, and that the medium is one that must be translated into the material substance of pigments.

Intriguingly, the duality of light as something that is both particle and wave relates closely to Choi’s methods of working in terms of painting technique. For an artist relying on their senses to depict afterimages, airbrushing is a superb tool for representing borderless juxtaposition and the nonmaterial presence of seemingly floating masses of color. The dominant afterimage is expressed through thick, flowing elements, and as its reverberations fade, it is captured through the dispersion of thin color particles, simulating the properties of an image that forms and disappears on the retina. In achieving physical contact on the canvas with his brush, the artist focuses on deliberately creating and fixing boundaries. Much like the clearly bounded interference patterns formed by overlapping waves of light, the images emphasized through Choi’s brush subtly reveal his yearning for pure abstraction beyond the realm of sensory representation.