Choi Chan Sook
Choi Chan Sook has been building up a visual vocabulary revolving around the themes of movement, migration, and community. She presents in various formats diverse perspectives and narratives pertaining to her position in life and existence. She has held solo exhibitions at Taipei Digital Art Center (2020) and Art Sonje Center (2017), and She has won awards at the Hyundai Motors Group VH AWARD (2019), Grant for emerging artist from Seoul Museum of Art (2017).
Interview
CV
Education
2009
Meisterschüler bei Prof. Maria Vedder, Universität der Künste Berlin, DE
2008
Vordiplom/Diplom, Visuelle Komminukation, Universität der Künste Berlin, DE
2004/2007
MFA, Kunst und Medien, Universität der Künste Berlin, DE
2001
BFA, Chugye University of Arts, Seoul, Korea
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2021
qbit to adam I, adam, Kang Contemporary, Berlin, Germany
2020
SUPERPOSITION—qbit to adam, Digital Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan
2020
It leaks, the light in their ground, Seoullo Media Canvas, Seoul, Korea
2017
2017 Art Sonje Project #5: Chan Sook Choi – Re – move, Art Sonje Center Project Space, Seoul, Korea
2017
Yin Yang Su Wha (yin and yang, water and fire), Humboldt Forum, Berlin, Germany
2016
Re move, Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany
2015
WE remember ME, MEINBLAU project space, Berlin, Germany
2015
The Promised Land, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, Korea
2013
The Nine Billion Names of God, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea
2010
Metamorphose, KunstDoc Gallery Seoul, Seoul, Korea
Selected Group Exhibitions
2021
Mutual Fragments, basis-frankfurt, Frankfurt
2021
Embark, 129 Gallery Berlin, Berlin
2021
all about Women festival, Sydney Opera House
2020
Sirene-Goldrausch 2020, Kunstraum Koreaeuzberg Bethanien, Berlin
2020
20th Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, Nemaf, Seoul, Korea
2020
Na Hrane / At the Limit / Am Limit, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia
2019
The Square, Art and Society in Korea, National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art, Geachon
2019
Ars Electronica Festival 2019, Linz, Austria
2019
DMZ, Culture Station Seoul 284,Seoul
2019
Multi-Access 4913, 2019 SeMA´s New Acquisitions, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
2019
Records Memories, The Center of Seoul City Architecture, Seoul
2018
SURVIVE, Hidden Dimension, Kunstpunkt Berlin Galerie für aktuelle Kunst, Berlin
2018
The Dictionary of Evil, Gangwon International Biennale, Korea
2017
Real DMZ Aarhus Edition, Aarhus Kunsthal Museum, Denmark
2017
No Limite, Museum of UFPA, Belem, Brazil
2017
Focus Female Korea, Never ending song, Meinblau Projektraum, Germany
2015
Links-Locality and Nomadism, Galaxy Contemporary art museum, Chongqing China
2014
Dark Border, Program by Kuture Projact Berlin, NON Berlin, Germany
2013
Reality, Gyungnam Art Museum, Chang Won, Korea
2013
Believe it or Not, Gallery ACC in Weimar, Germany
2012
NOT IN MY OUR BACKYARDS“, Schauwerk Leipzig & Akademie Schloss Solitude
2011
hat happened to God? Halle14, Spinnerei Leipzig
2011la
vie en général, v-kunst, Galerie Greulich, Frankfurt
Selected Intermedia Projects
2017
A matter of time B, The Haus der Deutschen Wirtschaft in Berlin
2017
Seoul Square, Media Facade Project, Seoul
2016
The Calms light from the east, Collaboration with Daegong Cheon´s solo exhibition, Hyundai Motors Studio, Seoul
2013/14
LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, di dante alighire, video design, National Theatre of Korea
2011
Private Collection, intermedia theatre, video projection and Director, Mullae Art Center in Seoul, Korea (supported by Seoul Culture Foundation)
2009
Second Sleep, Radialsystem in Berlin, Interaction between Dance, Music and Video Projection
2007
Leben? Oder Theater?, Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Solo of Joanne Gläsel about Charlotte Salomon as video projection
Selected Awards
2021
Stiftung KUNSTFOND, Arbeitsstipendium
2020
Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt
2019
the 3rd VH AWARD by Hyundai Motors Group, Seoul, Korea
2018
Grant for International exchange program from Arts Council Korea, Seoul, Korea
2017
Grant for emerging artist from Seoul Museum of Art, Korea
2013
New Rising Artist selected by Gallery LOOP, Seoul, Korea
2012
Artist for Tomorrow Prize for Artist of the Year, Sungkok Art Museum, Korea
2011
Studio14 International Fellowship of Halle 14 e.V, Leipzig, Germany
2009
Elsa-Neumann-Stipendien, Landesgraduiertenförderung des Senats Berlin, Germany
Selected Residencies
2019
Artspace Geumchon, International Residency program, Seoul, Korea
2018
Ars Electronica, International Residency program, Linz, Austria
2016
ACT media festival 2016, Forum Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea
2016
Real DMZ, Yang ju ri Residency by Samuso, Seoul, Korea
2011
Studio14: International Residency Program, HALLE 14, Leipzig, Germany
Selected Collections
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Museum of Contemporary Art Busan
Seoul Museum of Art
Sungkok Art Museum
Critic 1
The moment when the yoke of fragmented personal memories is perceived as our own problem:
Who am I, and where did we come from.
Lee Eun-ju(Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)
Individual narratives, group memories
We explore artists’ identities through their works. Various messages can be observed in the life of a single artist: the problems of an individual, or of a society, or of a state. While living in Germany for over 20 years, Chan Sook Choi has contemplated the history of human migration, the scientific and technological devices that enabled movement through space, and the issues of spiritual migration that accompany physical movement. On a microscopic level, she has acutely sensed the changes in unfamiliar environments around her, while exploring on a macroscopic level the history of humanity and its inevitable migrations as a whole. Using multiple media including video, performance and installation, she has reflected upon the lives of herself and of other women like her, while developing a calm and composed voice of her own.
All of Choi’s work starts from situations that can arise in humanity, history and society, but her perspective begins with highly intimate human histories. Normally, when art is used to address issues of humanity, history and society, the private life perspectives of individuals become inadvertently buried within grand narratives, but Choi’s works stand in diametric opposition to this rule. A direct example of this is The Promised Land, in which the exhibition hall is designed with machines and technology against the background of a company producing vehicles through beautiful, magnificent automation. The work prompted an awareness of just how mechanical a space we find ourselves in in contemporary society. But the artist goes further, also placing devices within the automated system that show videos of extremely ordinary private lives, awe of God, and stories of ordinary individuals able to live as protagonists in unfamiliar places. Here, she is stating that even within automation and technology-oriented perspectives, we must remember and maintain our human love, our intimate conversations with those around us, and our private daily lives.
Choi’s works thus relocate the philanthropy and love of humanity that cannot be produced or handled using automated systems, despite the highly industrialized nature of our society. This line of work continues in FOR GOTT EN. Conducted during her residency in Leipzig, this work was created to record how women in their 70s, 80s and 90s narrated their memories of God, faith and religion. It explored “spiritual migration,” a phenomenon totally different to that of physical migration (via transportation). If The Promised Land presented a situation of coexistence between physical and spiritual migration, FOR GOTT EN shows a more practical extension of the latter concept. The women who took part in these interviews had moved from the other cities in Germany to Leipzig.
To the artist, spiritual migration includes issues of re-transplanting or re-raising and re-organizing memories. Choi created a dedicated interview space in which to focus solely on issues of God and faith with the women. The space was produced as a mobile tool. Inspired by the form of a Korean kiln, it was built as a place for recording special memories while cut off from the outside.
Choi takes special situations and historical events that must be directly confronted while standing firmly in the time and space of the present as the central themes of her work. Using a variety of media, she evokes problems that were not resolved in the past, or are impossible to resolve. Summoned once again through her works, these problems are presented using arguments on a completely different level to the narrative methods of history, politics and sociology, though they deal with specific periods and events. Examples include Yangjiri Archive, produced over several months living in Minbuk Village, on the border of Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and Myitkyina, a work on the subject of comfort women. The themes chosen by the artist for her works—Minbuk Village and its residents, comfort women, migration—are ones that remain unresolved in Korean society. In this way, she uses a provocative yet restrained formal language to express weighty themes from the hidden side of Korean society that remain unresolved despite their importance.
Choi has devoted herself to two keywords, “migration” and “women,” with a central focus on Yangjiri Archive. Indeed, the topics of Minbuk Village and comfort women, in which she has immersed herself, transcend the framework of sociopolitical discussion that forms around Korean society. The artist does not fling her own thoughts into interpretations or assessments that package and present problems on the hidden side of Korean society, with its tortuous path of modernization including war and forced occupation by Japan, as finished stories. And she takes a very intimate approach to comfort women, a subject that can be regarded as taboo and covered up in Korean society. I believe she aspires to create a cautious and intimate relationship with her themes. In Yangjiri Archive, too, she highlights the lives of the migrant women living in the village rather than focusing on the political issues surrounding the village, such as the inherent division and military boundaries of the area. Choi’s working method explores the intimate life experiences and memories of individuals, while marking out the trajectories by which lives seen from a microscopic perspective gradually become history. Perhaps she doubts whether all of these things really need to become history at all.
Choi plans her works so that the particular situations and events within the themes she addresses do not become objectified within history. Perhaps the very act of attempting such plans is the role of an artist transforming history and women, incidents and people into works. Myitkyina is the story of 20 comfort women forcibly taken to the Myitkyina region of Burma. This work began with passenger records from the Maloha, a ship that sailed between between China and India. History aims to represent records from the past as factually as possible, but Choi’s Myitkyina takes a diametrically opposed stance to this. Indeed, since there is not a single witness and no extant testimony regarding the work, the artist derived her own individual narratives from the characters in photographs. What skies would the women in the photographs have seen in the unfamiliar land of Myitkyina? What sounds would they have heard all day? Questions such as these build the narrative structure of the work. Choi writes down “imaginary memories,” meditating on the skies the women would have seen and the individual feelings, such as fear of war, that they would have felt. Moreover the three women in the video were each in Myitkyina for a different reason. Their various opinions on how they came to be there are narrated: one was deceived into going; one went after seeing a recruitment notice for comfort women; and one was illiterate and had not been able to read the recruitment notice. Different opinions are thus given for a single situation. This is also an aspect of explanations for political situations, when a single incident is interpreted on various different levels, or when totally different opinions are formed. And, ultimately, the imaginary dialogues chosen by the artist were made possible because they are the stories of comfort women who left no testimony. Our problems, which exist, unresolved, despite Choi’s Myitkyina has eliminated works that objectify the lives of individuals in order to elucidate our own problems. She faithfully creates works that address how individual narratives can become all of our problem.
Critic 2
Dialectic Allegory between Earth and Body, Ego and the Other, Settlement and Migration
Lee Eunjoo (Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)
Refugee Crisis1
In March of 2015, a three-year old boy was found dead on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey. The small body of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee, was washed ashore. The horrendous image of the lifeless body lying on the beach sent angry shockwaves worldwide. The death of the boy, who fell victim to his parents’ choice between life and death and settlement and migration, prompted a frantic call to people around the world to act with moral responsibility. This was followed by violent protests, with voices exclaiming, “A boy died due to the wrongdoings of the world!” and “We are all at fault!” Next came the urge to revise immigration laws in every nation. Civil war in Syria had caused the mass migration of approximately two million displaced people who then attempted to emigrate to Europe.
On a winter day in December 2017, a black woman in France made an urgent call to an emergency response service, requesting an ambulance. However, the operator, who noticed the African migrant woman’s accent, did not send the one, and in the end, the woman died. When the news went viral in France, authorities initiated an investigation. The recording of the phone call, which was released to the public during the investigation, clearly indicates that the migrant woman was in tremendous distress when she pleaded, “I am going to die.” What’s more shocking is the operator’s response, “So, call your doctor,” and “Yes, you are going to die. Certainly. One day. Like everyone.”2 Human beings choose to migrate in order to survive or to search for better living conditions. Yet, they often face new threats in the region where they settle and, therefore, may choose to move again.
For instance, according to Sonia Shah, author of #The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move#, “People had fled Haiti en masse after a devastating earthquake hit the island in 2010. The U.S. government allowed about sixty thousand Haitians to stay in the country under a program known as ‘temporary protective status’ (TPS), which granted eighteen months of legal status to people from countries that suffered natural disasters or protracted unrest. Haitian earthquake survivors arrived in the United States on airlifts still covered in the dust from the rubble from which they’d been extracted. But the welcome did not last. A few months after the quake, U.S. officials sent Air Force cargo planes to Haiti to broadcast the message that anyone who dared try to come to the United States would be arrested and turned back.”3
With the recent surge in cross-border migration, politicians in favor of anti-migration policies are gaining popularity amid growing concerns that crimes by migrants and hatred toward migrants are escalating social crisis. As weakening racial boundaries appear to pose a bigger threat to racial purity, negative attitudes toward migrants have become more widespread. Recently, the philosophical views of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, which assert that a community needs to be built on a foundation of acceptance and hospitality toward the “other,” have become a topic of public discourse. Nevertheless, migrants are still living under unstable conditions. As they migrate — half-willingly, half-unwillingly — due to war or natural disasters, the issue of migration is no longer an issue pertaining to an individual’s life but, rather, it is a social problem.
The overarching theme of Choi Chan Sook’s artistic journey is migration. Choi’s work is presented in the form of an autobiography featuring her family history and other people’s life stories using video, performance, installation, and objects. Choi, a Korean-Asian woman artist who moved to Germany in her early 20s, was unable to assimilate completely into European society. Coincidentally, she found her existence being gradually forgotten in Korea, which prompted her to confront her status as an “existential” outsider. Human beings elect to move in search of a more stable life but, because of that choice, find themselves in a situation where they become isolated. The artist, who is not a stranger to this experience, began asking many questions of herself and others such as, “Why and how do human beings migrate?” and “Is physical migration the only possible form of migration?”
The types of migrating plant species, which move from one habitat to another due to climate change, are on the rise. This is common now both on land and sea: all living species, including animals and plants, move. Mankind is no exception, and people cross borders, often risking their lives, even as we speak. These days, satellites are used to track and take photos of migratory birds. The data collected in this way are used to identify migratory birds’ flyways. Global human migration data are also available, although the actual figure is arguably much higher than the statistics suggest. Migrants are often forced to repeat the cycle of migration, settling in yet another new place and feeling like strangers due to otherization. Stuck in the blurred boundary between theorization and dataization, Choi began to explore the concept of migration. At the center of migration were the lives of otherized women who lead independent lives despite their otherization.
One day, carrying a few photos with her, the artist embarked on a journey to Japan to trace her Japanese grandmother’s footsteps. By crossing the lives of her grandmother, who had moved to Korea during Japanese colonial period, and the artist, who is enjoying a plentiful life, wove stitch by stitch the temporality of the fragmented past onto a square fabric of the present. While tracing her beloved grandmother’s life in a distant, foreign country, Choi observed the firm fortress that was the nation’s borders and the people isolated within the fortress. Even though they had otherized and isolated themselves by choosing to migrate, they would be freed from the chains of racial discrimination, anti-miscegenation, classism, and neocolonialism had it not been for the nation’s borders.
While negative perceptions toward migrants are gaining stronger ground due to mass migration taking place of late, many theorists agree with Sonia Shah’s assertion, which strongly counters this perception. Shah opposes policies adopted by a number of governments that label refugees and migrants as intruders instead of accepting them as new neighbors. She asserts that mankind has the genetic urge to move — more so than to settle in one place — and acknowledges that Africa is where all of mankind originated4 and that human culture was originally a hybrid culture. Choi’s work embraces Shah’s view on tolerance and love for humankind in the context of migration.
Allegory of Settlement and Migration
Once she has selected a specific theme for her work, Choi embarks on a long journey of thorough research. Her new work always recalls parts of her previous works which had remained unresolved. In this way, her projects with different themes are interconnected with one another like a Moebius strip. To be more precise, personal and historical issues, memory and oblivion, and mental and physical issues are framed in a powerful, continuous allegory. When tracing the allegory of the world reconstructed by the artist, the interpretation of each work points to a consistent direction. In the process of identifying and interpreting each theme, seemingly disparate elements converge in one story. For instance, the central theme of #FOR GOTT EN# (2012) deals with religion-based, inner emigration but it also features — with no less significance — themes such as the lives of migrant women, forgotten memories, and the history of the human face. Another work, #Yangji-ri# (2018), highlights the placeness of the Civilian Control Zone and sheds light on the lives of resident elderly women in the form of an autobiographical fiction. Rather than being an observer on the periphery, the artist gets involved in the tiresome lives of her subjects living in Yangji-ri and becomes one with them. She also views the issues of the elderly women who have been living in the village through its inception from the perspective of land ownership regulated by the law and the system. In this sense, she tells the story of the body of the people who have built houses on land, which could be subject to legal dispute, and she amplifies the voices of the people who were stripped of basic rights, living outside of the boundaries of the system regulated by the nation. Elderly women of the Yangji-ri, who believe that the ownership issue will be resolved someday, live in an uncertain situation, in between settlement and migration. Perhaps Choi connected her own life, which has repeated the cycle of settlement and migration, with their seemingly peaceful lives with nevertheless unstable roots.
In all probability, this is why Choi replaces the women’s lives with her own to tell the history of migration and settlement from a broader perspective. As her work on the series progressed, it appears to have rekindled her desire to restore her past identity, which has been otherized in foreign countries. Whereas in the past she had felt as if she was standing in the middle of a vast sea all alone, as a stranger, isolated by an unfamiliar barrier of temporality, she is now standing side by side with many migrant women. Within the theme of migration, women, and land, the artist has produced #The Promised Land# (2010),5 #FOR GOTT EN, Yangji-ri#, and #Myitkyina# (2019), all of which have preceded her completion of the newly-released work, #qbit to adam# (2021). Indeed, in the end, all fragments of the finished works reconnect with the very first work.
As someone who has lived in Germany as a foreigner (‘intruder’)6 for a long while, Choi has understandably been drawn to the issue of migration and the lives of women and has continued to expand her research. Apart from the issue of who the subject or the other is, foreigners can be referred to as “people not from here.” As this statement connotes, the other can be shunned from the society and be locked up under the mandate that safe distance must be maintained between them and the rest of the society. The statement refuses to acknowledge the very existence of the other.7 Migrants are people who settle in a specific place with the hope of settling there permanently. Virtually every migrant hopes to avoid being labeled as a foreigner and dreams of stable settlement. However, for the humankind born with the strong innate desire to migrate, stable settlement is not always in the picture. This is true for many migrants: those displaced by war, those forced to live under colonial rule, or those who exist on the brink of life and death and thus are forever strangers, forever others. In consideration of such circumstances, Choi focuses on the hardships and the loneliness experienced by those who live with psychological deprivation as foreigners and forever strangers despite the ownership of physical space and stable settlement.
For Choi, the concept of migration is not merely about movement between physical spaces — that is to say, cross-border migration. Michael Arzt and Frank Motz analyzed Choi’s work saying, “Chan Sook Choi, 2012 Kunstraum HALLE 14 grant recipient, undertook fieldwork to investigate and research the contemporary status of God, belief, religion and spirituality by meeting with six women from a Leipzig parish. All were aged between 60 and 90, all were from Leipzig, and all held unwaveringly onto their faith during the GDR regime (1949 – 1989) which oppressed religious freedom. This was the beginning of Chan Sook Choi’s artistic as well as personally intensive long term research and meeting project #FOR GOTT EN#.”8 In this exhibition, a video installation presents the interviews with the six women, who reflect on their lives as they discuss faith and God, and memory and oblivion. The prevailing theme of this work is the interaction between personal history and religious perception. As she did for #The Promised Land#, Choi once again installed an apparatus for moving from one location to another: the palanquin is the means of transportation made specifically for the women in the interview. It functions as a reminder of the lives of the women and restores past memories that have been forgotten. The sentence, “Your eye is a window to your body/soul,” is written on the palanquin. According to Arzt and Motz, this is “an invitation to a journey through time and back, a trip that takes place in the personal memories of their lives as they are carried from the past into the present. Choi’s camera documented the process of memory; the women’s faces and their reactions to the film they were shown.”9 In this way, Choi provided these women with an opportunity to communicate with their own pasts, which, in turn, has expanded their present lives. Arzt and Motz continued their analysis:
“Chan Sook Choi created a mobile system, a small world allowing the old to unfold inside its frame, where they could look inward without the artist’s assistance. The artist’s personal address and her repeated visits to the women, her assistance and pastoral care, her dedication and appreciation allowed distance and inhibitions to melt, and all this radiating from an initially foreign and foreign seeming Korean, whose appearance is from another land, who speaks German with an accent and whose background is far removed from the East German region of Saxony.”10
Motz, who was the director of the project, provides a very detailed account of the process and of Choi’s perspective on making #FOR GOTT EN# while residing in Leipzig for months. As a foreigner in an unfamiliar land, Choi collaborated closely with her subjects for this project. In this process, the barrier between the objectified other — the six women — and the artist herself was torn down. The artist used this approach again when she created #Yangji-ri#. She lived in Yangji-ri for five months in order to grow closer to the elderly women — like a family member — and subsequently created this work. The endearing interest she paid to the women who had been otherized very likely provided solace to the women, who had experienced much struggle in their lives.
“While living in Yangji-ri, I was able to walk on land for the first time as part of my everyday life. Stepping out from home meant standing on earth, the land. There was this old lady, the eldest in the village, who was over 90 years old. She just casually mentioned while passing through, ‘I noticed you up late last night… I just came by and sat down here briefly because I missed my friend who used to live here.’ That was all she said… Since land is ultimately the basis for human life, it must be vital to those who want to settle down. The experience I had in Yangji-ri and the older women who lived there allowed me to contemplate land, body, and other forms of ownership.”11
The artist lived in the Minbuk Village, a propaganda village, in Cheorwon, Gangwon-do for five months and spent a lot of time with elderly women who have lived there for a long while. Since 1968, people began living in Yangji-ri, located in the Civilian Control Zone between North and South Koreas. The government had offered land for them to settle there; however, they could not have full ownership of the land. Choi heard various stories about the land comprising this village when she interviewed the women. For instance, “I came to live on bare land filled with mines. I later found out that, as the land was not in our name, should the owner happen to return, we would have been chased out and would not have been able to do anything about it.” Choi elaborated, these were “stories of hardship these women shared repetitively as they crouched to brush dust from crops they plucked from the land, stories filled with regret and frustration about the land not being theirs, told repetitively like the dust that blew around when they tried to brush it from crops.” While experiencing the history and lives of the people of Yangji-ri, she became interested in the way people owned land and about the fundamental human desire to settle on land. As a result, she posed the following question:
#“Why is the land yours?”#
Land, the border between settling and migration, and the significance of land ownership
“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)
“But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’” (Genesis 3:9)
Choi’s artwork can be further analyzed with the words of Alain Marchadour and David Neuhaus, “The second account of creation uses the word ‘earth’ (#adamah#) instead of Land (#aretz#). Adamah designates the very substance from which Adam is formed and from which apparently he derives his name. #Adamah# has the vocation to become a garden, a cultivated place, through the nurturing care of Adam. He is placed in the garden ‘to till it and keep it’ (Genesis 2:15).”12 Man was made from the earth of the Holy Land. In the land blessed in the name of the Lord God, man’s body may have been one with the land. Choi’s work, #qbit to adam#, is exhibited in a space filled with three large screens and a copper-textured floor. Within the texture of the land, the audience reads the narrative created by the artist about the body and the land. Choi studied the concept of land for many years — for instance, who established the borders of a given land, when the concept of ownership began to be applied to land, and how useful land would become as property in the future. With time as her resource, she attempted to answer questions about the land in social, historical, and religious contexts. The result of such deep contemplation is the one, mass allegory in which the land, the grave, the body, and the mummy converge or scatter in both video and text.
Choi explored the concept of land — made of earth and also the source of man’s body — and realized that this source is replaced by transcendence. Death, as man’s irreversible fate, returns him to the earth. From the word “land” in the Bible, where “land” is mentioned for the first time, to the word “land” as it is used in modern times, the history and the range of meaning of the “land” is vast. In search of the places where the border between land and body disappears, after a 23-hour flight, she visited the city of Calama in Chile as well as the nearby Atacama Desert. “In 1899, a mummy was found in an ancient mine located in northern Chile,” the artist recalled. “Green copper had seeped into his body over many years, turning it into mineral. Copper Man. If you look at his body carefully, you will see there is no border between the body and the land anymore.”13 Ultimately, this work originated from this scenario, from Choi linking the land to the body. The gallery floor is filled with copper-textured material, which functions as a medium connecting the land and body. It also symbolizes Copper Man, who arose from the earth covered in copper-colored minerals.
Land
Choi Chan Sook has continued pondering the concepts of migration, land, and land ownership through such works as #The Promised Land, Yangji-ri#, and #Black Air# (2019). The flow of her reasoning proceeded like dominos, one following the next. #qbit to adam#, which she completed for the Korea Artist Prize 2021 exhibition, is a convergence of all of her aforementioned keywords: “Adam,” who had been banished from the first land to the vast wilderness; “People,” who had been swept to the margins of the social, political contexts; “Workers,” who toil on the land their entire lives but still cannot secure their rights; “Land,” sold and bought based strictly on the logic of economics in capitalistic society; “Moments,” when vast nature turns into a personal possession; and “Migrants,” who still cannot find land on which to settle. To Choi, land is the resting place for the roaming body and soul, a space for embracing and welcoming others. Here, on the land, there is no social system that mass produces refugees, workers, or migrants. This land cannot be bought or sold; it does not belong to anybody, like a grave that rises on the land. When you reach the end of such reasoning, you realize that the body and the land are one and cannot be separated — the way it used to be before Genesis. In the land, where the desire of mankind has been castrated, the senses of texture and touch embrace our bodies, and the artist asks,
#How are the borders of the body and the borders of land different?
#What do you see when you look down into the grave of the dead?#
Body
Three large screens have been installed in the exhibition space to visualize the texture of the land, which appears to be alive and breathing. With this land as background, apricot-colored pieces of skin symbolizing the body rotate. Pieces of copper appear frequently on the screen, juxtaposed with the animated sense of the land as a backdrop. These flesh and copper fragments in the video signify that the body and the land are separate yet one. The gallery floor, which is covered in a copper-like material, seems to interact with the copper pieces in the video, surrounding the bodies of the audience. In this way, audience members connect, become one with the floor, the land; their bodies take part in the journey across this simulated land and the difficult lives of those who had been driven from it.
Then, Choi asks:
#When was the land separated from the body?#
Data
With advancements in technology, mankind is now moving toward the virtual, augmented, and hybrid realities made possible by computer data. They exert influence not only on our ordinary daily lives, but also on our societies, cultures, politics, and economies. This also pertains to the concept of land and land ownership. When virtual reality was first introduced, it was a public asset owned jointly by people — much like the way in which the land was regarded in relation to mankind through much of history. However, as the concept of common ownership began to disappear, a series of events we had experienced with actual, physical land are being repeated in the virtual world. We buy land on virtual platforms and focus on decorating avatars. I in the real world become an avatar in the virtual space I create and meet with other people — also avatars. Just like that, time and space in the real world move to the virtual. Besides eating and drinking, I buy a house there, which I decorate to my tastes, and I meet my friends virtually as well. As the concept of the land changes, the way in which humans intervene and manage the land has also changed. Additionally, the ego that exists in such a space sees the body disappear, becoming disconnected with the land, becoming an ego that has been transformed to data — to the avatar.
Moving land, the battle for the virtual land
In Ted Chiang’s short story, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” “I” from real life live together with an avatar in the same time and space. Ana Alvarado, who had failed to find a job for a long while, opens a window to Next Dimension and starts her favorite game: “Age of Iridium.” “The beachhead is crowded, but her avatar is wearing the coveted mother-of-pearl combat armor, and it’s not long before some players ask her if she wants to join their fireteam. They cross the combat zone, hazy with the smoke of burning vehicles, and for an hour they work to clear out a stronghold of mantids; it’s the perfect mission for Ana’s mood, easy enough that she can be confident of victory but challenging enough that she can derive satisfaction from it.”14 Ana is rejected by someone in real life but, in the “Age of Iridium,” her avatar is data that has an attractive item sought by all. Subsequently, Ana quickly accesses another Internet platform, “Data Earth,” to meet with a friend.
“She logs on to Data Earth, and the window zooms in to her last location, a dance club cut into a giant cliff face. Data Earth has its own gaming continents – Elderthorn, Orbis Tertius -
but they aren’t to Ana’s taste, so she spends her time here on the social continents. Her avatar is still wearing a party outfit from her last visit; she changes to more conventional clothes and then opens a portal to Robyn’s home address. A step through and she’s in Robyn’s virtual living room, on a residential aerostat floating above a semicircular waterfall a mile across. Their avatars hug,”15 and they start to talk to each other.
With the emergence of the virtual world, there are now avatars through which one can project their emotions as they do in the real world. Moreover, with the recent emergence of NFT and metaverse, land, houses, trees, gardens, cars, clothes, bags, and other items can be purchased in the virtual world just as the reality. As seen in Ted Chiang’s novel, people meet on an online platform where they can freely and comfortably do anything and everything they do in the real world. Not only should physical bodies be taken care of, but also the avatars existing in the virtual space. Separated from our physical, perhaps our minds and souls might more closely resemble non-material data. The concept of land ownership has switched to ownership in the virtual world while the body has been substituted by an avatar. I put together the images of myself, one of me standing on the vast and forlorn earth, and another of me floating in an ever-proliferating world, like the vast plains of the universe. I begin to move my body. Standing on the copper-textured floor and watching a video about the land, I sense a strong connection between my body and the land.
1 The English word ‘refugee’ originates from the French word ‘refuge,’ meaning a hiding place. This originates from the Latin word #fugere#, meaning a shelter from danger.
2 “Ce que l’on sait de l’histoire de Naomi Musenga, morte après avoir été raillée par une opératrice du Samu,” franceinfo, September 5, 2018, https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/ce-que-l-on-sait-de-l-histoire-de-naomi-musenga-morte-apres-av oir-tente-d-appeler-a-l-aide-le-samu_2743789.html.
3 Sonia Shah, #The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move#, trans. Seong Won (Seoul: Medici, 2020), 80.
4 “People who had faith in the myth of biological race and a racial order found sufficient scientific evidence to back up their beliefs. One popularly cited statistic from the Human Genome Project noted that people are 99.9 percent the same ‘regardless of race.’ That didn’t mean that a consistent 0.1 percent genetic difference defined racial groups.” Sonia Shah, #The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move#, trans. Seong Won (Seoul: Medici, 2020).
5 Choi Chan Sook juxtaposed two concepts when dealing with physical and mental migration. The concept of migration within the context of human history and personal history of migration is presented as the main narrative. On the other hand, the concept of ‘movement’’ is presented using tools and devices made available through technological advancement. She used means of movement as a direct metaphor for migration while using means of transportation to express imaginary migration. #The Promised Land# used the collage technique by putting together the video of a huge German theme park with an automated voice over of a Volkswagen showroom explaining the most advanced German technology. The more advanced technology gets, the more technologically dependent humankind becomes. As the voice of the guide explaining the fully-automated, safe production process of the Volkswagen factory that does not need any human intervention is played in this work, Choi raises the question, “What is the ultimate paradise that humankind is pursuing?” In this regard, Choi believes that “following the outcome of technological advancement and the goal of religion will eventually lead to utopian perspectives.” This work is played in a mobile structure whose motif is, according to the artist, “the mobile, portable temple that Jews have built for God’s promised land.”
6 Guillaume Le Blanc discusses the stigmatization of “foreigners” or “strangers.” “Strangers” are labeled so because they are considered a threat to a nation’s native language and legal system. In this sense, foreigners are “otherized” as those who constantly intrude. More importantly, otherization is originated from the hierarchical classification created by establishing foreigners as others in an effort to solidify control over these strangers. Guillaume Le Blanc, #Dedans, dehors: La condition d’étranger#, trans. Park Young-ok (Paju: Geulhangari, 2014), 34.
7 Ibid., 26.
8 Michael Arzt and Frank Motz, “You Are the Sole Carrier of Your Own Memory,” #FOR GOTT EN# by Choi Chan Sook (LOOP Press, 2015), 141.
9 Ibid., 142.
10 Ibid., 143.
11 Choi Chan Sook, #MMCA Artist Interview# (2021).
12 Adam distances himself from God by trying to hide. Adam experiences fear for the first time, thereby indicating that he had lost trust in God. As he had broken the covenant of God, the source of all blessing, the blessed land turned into the cursed land. He is banished from the land of blessing to vast, arid wilderness. Likewise, the land itself becomes destined to follow the misfortune of man. Alain Marchadour and David Neuhaus, “The Land, the Bible, and History: Toward the Land That I Will Show You,” trans. Kwon Yu-hyeon (Seoul: Withbible, 2006), 28-29.
13 Excerpt from Choi Chan Sook’s video work #qbit to adam# script.
14 Ted Chiang, #Exhalation#, trans. Sanghoon Kim (Seoul: Ellie, 2019), 99-100.
15 Ibid., 101.
Critic 3
On The Unreachable Abject Territoriality
Lee Yongwoo (media historian and cultural studies scholar)
The Faciality of Topos
The land is not the object of scientific perception,
but a sign that reveals what is within.
— Johann Gottfried Herder1
Henri Lefebvre said the physical space is to nature as mental space is to “formal abstractions,” and that social space is a place of human interaction vis-a-vis physical and mental space. If one posits that mental space or abstract space is not a completely separate concept from social space, but a structure in which groups and individuals coexist in historical contexts, then spatial practice may go beyond the physical properties of territory and land. Not only that, it becomes “a projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements, and moments of social practice in a cognitive territory.”2 Prior to mankind’s excursion into the modern logic of exclusion and inclusion via hierarchical order, species, and typology brought about by meeting the body, soil, and nature, the earth/place/territory existed as permanent Other within the modern rationale. It was merely a vacuumed spatio-temporality excluded from human perception.
Choi Chan Sook, a visual artist, has long deliberated over the numerous indivisible relationships pertaining to the land and the body, such as those pushed aside, intentionally or unintentionally, within the epistemological topography of mankind, the cognitive ways we distinguish migrants from immigrants, and the processes behind changes in our concept of land ownership. Drawing from her personal experiences as a migrant to and longtime outsider in Berlin, Choi unravels the various meanings behind spatiality and memory in the exhibition The Promised Land (2015) that are attached to the terms “inner emigration” and “physical emigration” through unfamiliar concepts of “Autostadt”3 that evoke scenography,
and “opto-rhodopsin”4—a form of future technology known for optogenetics.5 These subjects, themes, and works are more evident in her exhibition, Re-move (2017), which depicts the victims of sexual slavery drafted by Japan’s Imperial Army, the Yangji-ri women of Minbuk Village at the Demilitarized Zone, Japanese women who were encouraged to marry Koreans (as represented by the artist’s own grandmother), the trajectory of scars in diaspora women, their loose-knit subaltern solidarity narrative and the politics of identity, the instabilities and hesitations derived from involuntary and arbitrary migration, and the archive of memories that spring from waves of anxiety and unrest unfolding like a prism. From The Promised Land (2015) to Re-move (2017), Choi rests upon the constellation of performativity woven by the imageries in the fragmented life of “the Other” and the affect of life. She further tunes the frequencies—their subtle vibrations and cracks in daily lives—of perpetual “Others” who can never settle as they signal through roots that trail long and far before them. The organic narratives of her work continue to expand and contract, revealing contemplative views that, at times, evoke the following: memories of the individual and their ontological validity, various discords created by personal narratives of individuation clashing with collective memories, individual context that has been forgotten amidst historiographic facts and events, and the potentialities in the memories of traces and places of those who have been whitewashed and voided, rendered into empty space.
An Organic Spatiality and the Territorialized Sensitivity: 60 Ho
Her new work 60 Ho (2020) details the personal narratives of women who settled in one of the 112 propaganda villages located up North at the Civilian Control Zone of the Demilitarized Zone. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, these villages were established for purposes of land-clearing and propaganda against North Korea. The village of Yangji-ri in Cheorwon, Gangwon-do, spreads widely below the small peak of Sapseulbong. A large immigrant colony formed in response to political promises of cheap land and housing made by the Park Chung-hee administration. In the Google Earth panorama of Yangji-ri, filmed in a bird’s-eye view, the colorfully roofed houses all sport windows facing north—supposedly to facilitate observation of the enemy—but the insides are makeshift, each with its own complex structure. The camera angle passing through the grotesque interiors acts like an endoscope, projecting onto a screen the intimate origin of personal psychogeography regarding ownership of land. This view captures how an individual’s emotions and actions, like a living creature, affects the spatiality—the architectural environment and its intentions—in discernible or indiscernible ways. Following Korea’s liberation, countless migrants flocked to Minbuk village and its context of war, usurpation, reclamation, and speculation. What lay behind the fervid craving to settle in that village? Can we say that the land we stand on is truly ours? Land owned initially by North Korean defectors or by Japanese became land without ownership after the liberation and the Korean War.
Then the National Land Use and Management Law was issued in 1972, and the government recognized land-ownership rights in the Civilian Control Line area in the early 1980s. After that, the “landowners” claiming registration documents appeared one after another, causing friction with the current residents of Yangji-ri.6 Numerous migrants, especially women who had long been indigenous to the land, were denied ownership and eventually reduced to tenant farming.
Choi Chan Sook contemplates this strange series of events and sharply captures the points evoked and expressed by the network of land/body/ownership, territorial and political events, and “organic spatiality,” where mankind and land twist and turn as if they are homologous structures. Furthermore, she navigates a close microhistorical viewpoint of future socio-legal directions and potentialities for change inherent in land ownership. Under the patriarchal family-register system, female migrants who lost their husbands to war, or to the mines scattered about their everyday living space, cannot claim ownership of their territory. Like ferns clandestinely sporing in a perilous ecosystem, they settle temporarily in the “kitchen corner or tiny room,” the twisted interstices of the village. In this state of temporal tranquility, these people, silently enduring with a desperation to become true settlers—clearing land that bears the names of men whose soft hands know neither labor nor dirt—become numbers. Village soldiers begin to address them as such. 60 Ho refers to a human reduced to a mere number in the place where she resides. In this village, it is humid and cool even in the summer. In Artificial Sun (2017), heat fans are placed in various corners of a house, lending the lives of these numbered female migrants a warmth that burns brighter than the sun. We are faced with the artist’s disenchanted perspective that seems almost apathetic, simultaneously delivering the video’s rush and shock. The handheld camera glides across the maze of a Yangji-ri house, as if in an RPG, and summarizes via Google Earth the ruins of the Demilitarized Zone—a symbol of historical catastrophe. Ironically, the artist’s indifferent gaze makes us more acutely aware of the relationships of coercive coexistence, of the secularized memories of places/territories of inhumanity, and of the “otherization” people have had to face, in all its absurdity, within a macro-historical landscape.
There are qualities of the unheimlich, pathological traits, and waves of emotions or ambience triggered by the symbolic meanings behind oblique territory/land/place. Further, there are subtle, invisible frequencies that go unreachable and undetectable by the macro-worldview and collective memories much like the imperceptible face/faciality7 of the abject, of those caught in involuntary decline, referred to as 60 Ho. All of these pierce through the deepest trench of imagined geographies in those who have lost their names, revealing in detail the dynamics of attraction and repulsion brought about by the resonance between mankind and space. The screening zooms in on and fades out from people self-mockingly singing trot songs (“I am I am drama, who will know of my story”), while Donald John Trump creates a sense of crisis between the two Koreas with a political speech asserting that the North will face “fire and fury.” Just as the two scenes are mutually juxtaposed, land and settlement, migrant and memory, sedentary and non-sedentary, and the succession of images and connections woven by rhythm all become allegories that accumulate and scatter. The work gradually breaks down the narrative and symbolic skeletons embodied by the memory of the body and the materiality of land, altering and superseding them with fragments of minerals and drifting inorganic substances. In compliance with the artist’s contemplative intentions, the viewer’s gaze follows the image of inorganic substances that operate as signifiers of visual narratives, advancing the narrative under the guidance of the mouse cursor. The images of minerals in 60 Ho, represented as rocks or copper, substitute for the physicality/materiality of subjects that have been genderized and Otherized, while embodying the memories of the land without ever having owned it in Choi’s previous works. Eventually, these images begin to correspond with the non-human subjects of the abject (such as minerals) that run on empty in the pitch-black darkness, denied inclusion permanently in the frameworks of territorialized sensitivity and geographical conceptualizations of the norm. Just like parallelism, these images continue and lead into qbit to adam (2021).
The Non-Sedentary and Spatio-temporal Translocality: qbit to adam Belonging to No One, and None to All
Physical environments and places aren’t meaningful from the beginning; they gradually form meaning by forging relationships with the humans they surround in due time. In other words, the accumulation of such relationships and memories—created and altered in relation to environment and place—can be seen as proof and a vital part of settlement/the sedentary, and as presenting a more comprehensive sense of place. In her new work qbit to adam, created during the pandemic, Choi expands, both conceptually and spatiotemporally, her focus on “individuation” and the “non-sedentary.” That has been visualized by land and territory—an interest formerly scrutinized via themes of the Demilitarized Zone, border areas, migration, and the women’s narrative. The narrative of locality is a narrative of the central/centrifugal, static/dynamic, and opening/closing. In it, we see fragmented memories like stamped seals of those who were pushed aside in the village of Yangji-ri; we feel a sense of loss amid the breakdown of a rejected community that has undergone migration, settlement, and the extinction of self. From the mines of the ancient Atacama Desert in northern Chile to a virtual world in digital space, qbit to adam expands the artist’s worldview of locality and bares the ontological flesh of questions connecting locality to translocal body/land/place by exploring the spatiality within the numerous kinds of spatiotemporal nature. With qbit to adam, Choi Chan Sook critically reappropriates the knotted arguments of the body/land/historicized texts and “pours out” a number of questions pertaining to the following: ontological and metaphysical semantic networks and their alternative directions, and human–nonhuman individuations of land/place/space “that belongs to none and none to all.”
Just as Walter Benjamin was transfixed by the immortality of the wax figure at Musée Gravin that resisted organic decomposition,8 qbit to adam, which begins with a metaphor of the Copper Man, is in itself a metaphor of organic/inorganic, the boundary between life and death, and a dislocation of future and past that poses numerous ontological questions about the following: the acquisition of individuality in the extinction of land and the death of non-humans as inorganic substances that the tomb of earth metonymizes as the soil sprinkled atop the mineral waste of an abandoned mine; the relationality revealed in dualities of the self and others, inclusion and exclusion, and body and land that were incubated in the process of establishing a modern and contemporary concept of territory in regards to ownership and crop yield; the expansion of the virtual subject as an extended territory of new spatiality and bodily sensation that are reappropriated by the digital environment and data; and the spatiality as a “topos” in which objects may interact with each other purely as objects, gaining a singular, immaculate, and complete individuality within the relational time of the present. The recursive conclusion to the questions derived from these themes is here on the very ground we step on, in this mental and physical space that reflects us vaguely—like the surface of a bronze mirror.
Fragments of stone, copper, flesh, and metal circulate. These weightlessly drifting fragments of land are then visualized into images of memories/data. (This repetitive structure of circulation is also replicated on the video playing on the semitransparent copper mesh screen facing the three-channel screen.) Meanwhile, the narration holds together these intersecting videos for 33 minutes in three different voices/transcendental subjects. This serves as the center point, conveying the artist’s desire to hold the audience completely in her narrative within this “space” of the exhibition. The individual narrative of land/body/ownership, spread across an overwhelmingly large screen, is not presented as any of the following: an operational system, its reason of existence, or a measure of individuality that explains the possibilities of said existence. In fact, it operates as an “intermezzo” that permeates the space and screen like liquid, forging a smooth connection between the different topographies of land/body/exhibition-space. It also conveys the “undecided nature of the open space” inherent in such topographies, and a non-hierarchical “analogy” that defies all parallels, references, and coordinates. The amalgamation of these narratives can be seen as a journey towards joining, separating, and reestablishing relationships within the singular space of the exhibition.
The exhibition floor is set up dark and blurry, much like the bronze mirror of a Mongolian shaman. The self-reflective image bounced back by this surface is an appropriation, hardly a faithful representation of self and screen. (The installation boasts a finish of the same copper sheets that were used on the floor, but not on the screen.) Namely, it operates as an ontological mirror9 designed not to self-reflect but to attempt to escape from present space and the self of reality. Its subtle distortions and shaking images incessantly stimulate and encourage contemplations on thoughts or reason by continually dislocating the images, making them amorphous and variable. The artist approaches the design of this “space of thought that transcends time and space” like a meticulous scenographer, subtly tilting the screen 10, 23, and 28 degrees from the right side of the exhibition space. Much like ending rhymes that seem to parallel one another before subtly diverging, the screens are placed at angles, similar to antennas that detect the wavelengths of the universe. Snow formations called “Penitentes” “grow” towards the rising sun in the spitting image of kneeling human figures doing penance. The screen follows the trajectory of the artificial sun and projects the image of the earth, acting as a stage device. Images and the exhibition space reflect and overlap as three distinct voices evoke a sense of presence in “synesthesia.” Through this synesthesia, which pertains to the body and space of the audience, viewers themselves become objects of the artwork, operating as a stage device filling out the empty narrative space of the exhibition.
As demonstrated, qbit to adam is an attempt by incomplete narratives to escape across boundaries and meet a new “land.” On this journey, countless individual narratives intersect and nomadize, untethered by any particular nature/land/territory/spatiality—constantly on a path toward new meaning. Concurrently, the exhibition also becomes an “exhibitionary dialectic discursive sphere” that borrows and repeats former concepts and discourse, creating differences by leading to a new flow of creation. And all this begins from the fragmented visualization of the discourse on nature/land/territory/spatiality that has been permanently otherized from the frameworks of a narrative structure of modern history; from reflections on nature/land/territory/spatiality that has been regarded as “irrational, otherizing, unscientific, and of indeterminate form”; and from the artist’s proposition of reinstating what lies behind the narrative of modernity best represented by humanistic choices, along with the human affects triggered by all of the above. Through this ambitious project, Choi actively reinterprets and re-summons intimate personal narratives of human–nonhuman subjects occupying nature/land/territory/spatiality that previously had no choice but to exist in a narrative vacuum of historical statements. Furthermore, she transcribes these narratives onto a palimpsest of memories and interpretations on which such spatiality is printed. Moreover, qbit to adam manages to reproduce via “imaginative crossover storytelling” the artistic effects, imaginary topographies, and mythological, literary, and scientific discourse regarding the catastrophic contemporaneity of Planet Earth, where mankind dominates nature, our footprints permanently marking the trajectories of geology in the Anthropocene epoch. This is built on foundations of human–nature hierarchy, COVID-19, the metaverse, and the advent of a post-apocalypse triggered by the collapse of the ecosystem—all themes of interest to the art discourse at this time. Now, the actuality of an exhibition space comes alive in viewers’ minds with all the partiality that imagination entails. And, without a doubt, this entices us.
Coda: On Spatiality as Pure Memory
The resonances are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world,
while the reverberations invite us to give greater depth to our own existence.
In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own.
The reverberations bring about a change of being.
It is as though the poet’s being were our being.
— Gaston Bachelard, excerpt from The Poetics of Space10
Gilles Deleuze explains how the past is a transcendental condition that defines the present via the concept of the paradox of “contemporaneity.” That is to say, present time may flow only when the past and present exist within the same timeline.11 The pure memory of Henri-Louis Bergson speaks to an epistemological state in which a certain lesson has been learned in the past that cannot be repeated and is not internal to the body. Pure memory is not simply limited to registering the past through remembrance or the act of reminiscing. It is a state in which memory itself has the potential for ontological independence as it defies the passage of time, contracting and relaxing for eternity in a mode of existence that enables simultaneous coexistence.12 It is not unlike how Anaximenes’s age-old question of memory dawns on us, evoking our own pure memories as we observe the dislocated minerals from a mummy’s knee expand and enlarge into fractals: “We are told God created man from soil and breathed life into man so that he may become a living soul. Was his breath cold? Or hot?”
The artist’s interest in humans’ ambivalent ability to breathe cold and warm, the coexistence and order of those two worlds, and the possibilities inherent in change are tied to her own life. Choi’s interests inevitably mix with her experiences of vividly worrying about the future of her unborn child—soon to awaken in a dystopian reality—and of remembering the tactility of death she felt while watching her mother gradually pass away. By juxtaposing her maternal self breathing cold air—while “imagining the order in which one will die” in a “near-death experience”—with the vitality of warm breathing like her future sleeping child’s, Choi questions the spatiality of the body as a non-sedentary that empties and fills, withstanding fluctuating temperatures. Just as Bergson preached that pure memory precedes images but may contain the possibility of existing in the form of an image, the artist is attempting to visualize the “coexistability” of incommensurable “substances” that encompass everything and behind which some kind of conception may be/is lurking. This speaks of a representational system of memory that is general, ambiguous, without tense, and unable to be regarded as the basis or token of a certain phenomenon like a body or substance. These images are invisible yet present, experienced as a perception or memory already inherent in our minds.13
In this sense, the overlapping metaphor of “knees” that makes repeated appearances in Choi’s works is full of significance. Minerals derived from the knees of Copper Man connect with the emersion of landforms in the shape of kneeling penitents called “Penitentes” and, soon enough, join on the cross-screen of an emotional insert of a mother kneeling before residents opposing the building of a special-needs school in Gangseo district. The knee metaphor makes real a moment of “surrender, penance, and awakening” (“slap one’s knees” is a Korean idiom akin to “Eureka!”), referring to the creation of yet another object begotten from an object. [seulha 膝下 in the Korean phrase “the child of seulha 膝下” literally means “under the knees.”] To the artist, the personal reasons behind what she considers the safest non-sedentary space for her unborn child to occupy in the near future, are a desperate, important pure memory that brings awareness of the land/place/spatiality. In due time, the child will learn to meet the world by bringing to its mouth whatever is strewn about the room or burning itself on something hot. This is why the parent keeps the child in the safest land/place/territory: below her knees. As such, qbit to adam is a “topos” of organic totality in which the heterogeneous subjects of artist and audience—through their individual bodies observing the exhibition—extract perception and memories and seek the possibility of coexistence via contemplation and reflection. The metonymization of spatiality revealed in qbit to adam, along with the expansion of the conceptual/sensory meanings behind nature/land/territory/spatiality brought about by advancements in technology, emphasizes the indivisibility of the land and body, or possibilities of coexistence in the land and body—not unlike the Copper Man, in whom the two “states” of organic and inorganic coexist (the Copper Man later appears in the face of an avatar in cyberspace). From ancient mines to the mining of cryptocurrency, the artist overviews the “history” of past labor and the concept of virtual ownership in the near future. In doing so, she overturns the foundations of modern epistemology—namely, the narrative systems and discourse frameworks based on rational thinking—and intentionally bypasses, affects, revolves, and recreates the directions of meanings radiated by these prisms.
As such, Choi creates a nondiachronic narrative of pure memories pertaining to a primal nature/land/territory/spatiality that knows not the concept of ownership and promise—in other words, the “potential as a priori condition”—and dictates that negotiations between human “intervention” and nature cannot by any means dismantle the original meaning of land/space/territory. Furthermore, she asks the audience the legitimate meanings behind “actuality”—the sense of the earth we stand on. Here, viewers may interrogate the intended reinstatement of the memory of the other, the individuation of nonhuman spatiality, and the dismantling of the meanings behind the other/land/space/territory that exists in a narrative-imaginative vacuum built upon a foundation of communal silence. What did Choi intend to say with these matters? As Bachelard articulates in The Poetics of Space, in the “resonance” we hear the poem, and in the “reverberations” we speak it. The “resonances” and “reverberations,” created for the possibility of coexistence in “substances,” draw out a “change in existence.”
The metanarrative and post-genealogical symbolic representation exhibited in Choi’s qbit to adam and 60 Ho visualize the political/social/cultural hierarchical topography pertaining to the invisible nature/land/territory/spatiality that has always existed yet had little choice but to be hidden and oppressed. At the same time, the work reads as a resilient pledge, or token, assuring us of the eventual recovery of the original textures that were once warm and smooth. It does this by dismantling and rupturing potential realities that could never be clearly defined with the inherent pure memory of individual senses. The artist’s intimate personal narrative ends with an epilogue of stone, copper, flesh, and metal. “What land would I return to upon death?” This question reverberates like a round song in the exhibition hall, resonating with the audience. And there lies the “promised land” that belongs to none and none to all.
1 Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784).
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 8: “spatial practice consists in a projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements and moments of social practice.”
3 A compound word of “automobile” and “city,” and the actual name of a Volkswagen factory-tour program. By appropriating the curatorial presented by this gigantic theme park, the artist shows the change in the possibility of bodily movement through the development of mobile technology, such as the dissemination of personal vehicles through energetic guides of cutting-edge technology and contradictory texts and images. The artist also reveals an overlapping, ambivalent interest in physical and mental migration by erasing moments of everyday scenery and memories with a different light.
4 A compound word of “light” (opto) and “light-sensing pigment proteins” (rhodopsins) in the retina of the eye. An opto-rhodopsin is a virtual device that can implant memories by electrically stimulating light particles received by the eye.
5 A compound word of “light” (opto) and genetics. The term refers to a technology that controls brain activity through light control and genetic-engineering technology.
6 From 1968 to 1973, the Park Chung-hee administration began to build national villages, such as Reconstruction Villages and Unification Villages, in the DMZ for the purposes of civilian defense and anti–North Korea propaganda. Yangji-ri is one of the Reconstruction Villages. Many people suspect that the quality of life there deteriorated because the poor moved in; the village is officially a temporary residence because the state did not recognize the private right to land or housing. In 1972, the Yushin Constitution stipulated the necessity of national land planning. In the same year, the National Land Use and Management Law called for systematic management of urban and non-urban areas. Land-related problems began to arise when the government recognized land-ownership rights in the Civilian Control Zone in the early 1980s to revitalize the economy after the second oil crisis in 1970. The government also promoted the policy of allowing owners to register non-recovered land for the purposes of preservation and restoration. As a result, people appeared with documents proving past ownership to claim their private-property right. Soon, friction began with the residents who had already risked their lives settling into the village, for instance by removing landmines from the land. For more information, refer to Hee-nam Jung (2010) and Sang-in Jun and Jong-kyum Lee (2017).
7 Félix Guattari coined the term “faciality-landscapity” (visagéité-paysagéité) to describe the spatial form of the redundancy of the unconscious. Guattari explained that a face is a product of specific social formations. When certain facial expressions are acquired by symbols and expressions that transpire through calculation, the face finally achieves its independent “faciality-landscapity,” detached from the body/head. In other words, a face embedded with facial expressions as signifiers becomes a tool and sign to convey one’s intention. Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents Series, 2011).
8 Benjamin describes the wax figure in the Musée Gravin as a “Wish Image as Ruin: Eternal Fleetingness,” stating, “No form of eternalizing is so startling as that of the ephemeral and the fashionable forms which the wax figure cabinets preserve for us.” Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, trans. Kim Jeong-a (Seoul: Munhakdongne, 2004).
9 Caroline Humphrey argued that the shaman’s bronze mirror was designed to stimulate human thought. The principle of the diffuse-reflection effect distorts the mirror slightly, keeping humans from seeing themselves as they are. Caroline Humphrey, “Inside and Outside the Mirror: Mongolian Shamans’ Mirrors as Instruments of Perspectivism,” Inner Asia, vol. 9, no. 2 (2007), 173–195.
10 Bachelard, 2014:7.
11 All the pasts and presents are diachronic if the present and the past are diachronic at every moment. Therefore the present and the past as a whole always coexist. Deleuze says that “what we call the empirical character of the presents which make us up is constituted by the relations of succession and simultaneity between them, their relations of contiguity, causality, resemblance and even opposition [...] what we live empirically as a succession of different presents from the point of view of active synthesis is also the ever-increasing coexistence of levels of the past within passive synthesis.” Gilles Deleuze and Paul Patton, Difference and Repetition (2001), 83.
12 Joo Jae-hyung, “On the mode of existence of Bergson’s pure memory,” Cheolhak, vol. 129 (2016), 153.
13 Herni Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Park Jong-won (Seoul: Acanet, 2005), 151.
References
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