Haneyl Choi Brings the Boys to the Yard

Haneyl Choi explores the possibilities for sculpture as a narrative framework, combining various symbols and materials in indeterminate formulations. The resulting works are formally and symbolically ambiguous, and elicit unconventional interpretations.

Choi's multisite exhibition Manner, taking place at P21 and GALLERY2 in Seoul (25 August–1 October 2022), presents punchy, immersive installations that fuse industrial materials and technologies with readymade objects. Drawing from consumer culture and queer imagery, as well as from Korean traditional art, modern art history, and formal aesthetics, Choi redefines binary norms in relation to the body, identity, and material culture.

Presented at GALLERY2 are a series of three nude male figurative sculptures—C1, C2, and C3 (all 2022)—sleekly rendered in fibre-reinforced plastic and 3D print, and clustered together in a bright blue wallpaper-lined room amidst other sculptures and video works.

C1 boasts absurdly enlarged muscles, covered in thick veins; C2 stands confidently, hands on hips, with disproportionately bulging shoulders; and the slender C3 stands with his back arched in a submissive position. Reminiscent of shop mannequins, Choi's works illustrate humorous, exaggerated caricatures of masculinity.

Surrounding these figures are several folding screens: a development from the artist's 2018 exhibition Traitor's Patriotism at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, which included contemporary reinterpretations of byung-poong or traditional Korean folding screens.

Choi's inhabiting of these traditional forms act as a gesture that pitches the artist's negotiation of traditional and contemporary identities—both queer and nationalistic.

In GALLERY2, a translucent eight-panel acrylic folding screen titled For my own boys (2022) is UV-printed with the image of an abstract sculptural installation which recalls a silhouetted cityscape. Placed amongst a densely packed room, the screen is functionally rendered somewhat redundant.

The hybrid synthetization of body and machine forms an ongoing thread in Choi's practice, defined by its provocative aesthetic sensibility that revels in the abnormal, the hybridised, and the absurd.

In one corner of GALLERY2, T5.3 (2022) presents a pair of disembodied 3D-printed legs riding a readymade longboard. At Manner's concurrent location at P21, a biomorphic 3D-printed sculpture titled H1 (2022), shows a deformed human hand with fingers forming several heart shapes, generating an eerie tension through the unsettling juxtaposition between a disembodied, misshapen limb and its glossy, manufactured materiality.

Other works at P21 pose more challenging, ambiguous narratives. In T2 (2022), a readymade go-kart is positioned in its own, pristine white space, with digitally printed concentric rings on the ground resembling animated, twisted water-like forms, framing this object of leisure. Sinuous golden branches emerge upwards from the kart's frame, caging it in an aerial manner.

The sense of absurdist idolatry that surrounds T2 might invoke the 20^th-century American sculptor John Chamberlain, and his large abstracted sculptures composed of scrap automobile parts—something also seen in the installation at GALLERY2, where three kart-based sculptures are displayed. Whether Choi's preoccupation with the 'masculine' fetish-object is in jest or irony is left to the viewer.

In another space, the sculpture PR7 (2022) comprises a semi-submerged three-dimensional cross, its surface digitally printed with an assortment of images from seemingly disparate sources—cyborg skulls, Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, body parts and diagrams, and digital renders.

An archetypal symbol of faith and dogma, the cross appears to sink into the ground under the weight of its own ideology. A sense that is amplified by the hyper-digital printed wallpaper—featuring suggestive emojis including singular eyeballs and the triple water droplets—extending his three-dimensional language to the surrounding environment.

There's an interesting tension that runs throughout Manner, between Choi's unapologetically provocative, exuberant attitude and the ambiguous juxtapositions and assemblages that seem to evade linear or easily expressed interpretations.

Challenging standardised dichotomies of softness and rigidity, realistic and surreal, conventional and non-normative, Manner presents a rich, nuanced exploration of queer and bodily representation, contextualised within an environment of artifice and excess to eliciting new readings of material narrative.—[O]