2020년 5~6월 갤러리JJ에서 개인전을 했던 시원한 블루의 터치감과 절제된 색채로
이 세상속의 생명에너지를 담아내는 최승윤 작가 소개와 갤러리 보도자료이다.
“The uncertainties in my work are like the stars in the sky. Looking from a distance,
it is just another point. Divulging the worlds inside me that are alike but not equal…”
Artist Note, 2013
GalleryJJ is pleased to present recent works by Seungyoon Choi that portray the prolific energy of the world with his expressive strokes and moderate colors. They speculate the basic principles constituting and operating the world in which he creates his abstract language. The unique charm and dynamic energy from its aesthetic pleasure and gesture have yielded him firm patronage, and many companies have collaborated with him such as Samsung TV in 2019.
Choi has been expressing on canvas the duality and paradoxical phenomena in the world that he has pondered. While this seems fundamental and macroscopic, it is a question stemming from his own experience and perception in daily life. It is about the world and himself in the first place. Coupled with the concept of time, it has led him to reflect on paradoxes in life and death, flow and halts, and observation of small things in earthly life and its subtle emotions.
GalleryJJ features Choi once again since the ‘Blue Flower’ show in 2017. This solo exhibition finds significance in that the artist goes beyond his way of seeing the world from the perspective of others that has separated him from its reality. Instead, he now locates himself in it to establish a more organic relationship between him and the world. This includes sentiments based on his imagination of future society with artificial intelligence and digital reality in which the continuum of his thoughts thus far is embodied as the ‘world ahead’. His oeuvre up until now, including this show and space and time series in the previous years, is very consistent and defines the theme of expanding and narrating his attitude towards the world. On view will be about 30 new paintings that focus on Me and the World series, which is the title of the work and the theme of this exhibition.
It is notable that his work expressively renders the slices of life and the world that cannot be defined singularly, and sublimates them into liberating and lively energy. This energy seems to originate from the compression and movement of time created by the overlap of brush strokes. The ideas of individual, object, and subject do not predate, but it may result from various forces or flows of attributes that constitute them. His work shows a more refined sensibility with a solid structure to move away from existential anxiety. The possibility of “I” that leaps away from the existing notions to affirm and create life is presented to encounter. The exhibition pays attention to this idea and poses another reflection on the world and ourselves.
“The world I’ve ever pondered was missing something… If you think about it, the world cannot be completed without the piece of “I”… Now, I’m going to start talking about the World and I.”
Artist Note, 2020
Para-Doxa
Choi’s bold touch leaves blue strokes behind that create a tense and dynamic image by meeting and overlapping each other as if they come to life. He spreads canvas on the floor and dashes with brushes or spatulas that he made. His paintings mainly show translucent and fluid strokes with different shades of pigment, and the time, direction, and accidental factors of each stroke generate meanings. These coincidental events on canvas extend to the realm of paradox beyond the artist's naissance and the birth of the universe, the unknown stories and ascription of meanings. He relies on the senses to alternate between the moments of painterly actions and pauses, yet does not miss the sensibility of coexistence and balance. His work has a reserved composition as a whole, but because of the intertwining and mutually influencing elements, a constantly spawning and vanishing Dionysian vitality erupts from it.
His abstract language of varied strokes of each color linking, splitting and overlapping have a formal appeal in the sense that it intuitively denotes the conflicting phenomena in life. It reveals the opposing ideas coexist in a latent state. He maintains a balance between contradictions and divisions to understand the world – the universe and life creation, the start and the end of drawings, yin and yang, and such small things in daily life. “Though not visible to the naked eye, from the camera’s focus that captures the stories of countless stars…” The palm-sized universe he stumbled upon contains everything and a vast universe. Choi perhaps also endeavors to remember his own Aleph – a metaphoric expression by Jorge Luis Borges for a place where every point of the universe from every angle is present yet not topsy-turvy.
Duration
The lines and spaces on his canvas are seemingly moving yet paused or losing yet controlled. They collide and reconcile with each other to generate vigor. Novel movements are created by repeated tension and relaxation, and expansion and contraction. The heterogeneity penetrating each other continues with life formation. The beginning and the end are in contact and do become one unseparated whole as his previous work titles implied such as Start of Stop, Completion of Departure, and Profile of Moment. Time and motion are understood as the essence of flow. According to Henri Bergson, the beginning and the end are in contact, and from the perspective of continuous-time (experienced time), there are constant changes only. Duration is the way of transformation, liveliness, and movement. Thus duration inevitably implies totality and heterogeneity. The consciousness of life does not exist discretely but appears as a stream connected. Choi’s work is a part of becoming to create new qualitative differences and expressions of constantly changing and acting creatures.
Everything in the world that we meet empirically is changing in such an endless manner. The current period is more attentive to the creation of a world that evolves and coincides and is more enthusiastic for novel creations than metaphysical values, which have changed our perception of fixed reality.
Abstraction
Choi abstracts his perception of the world. When the meaning of objective reality or essence is dismantled in modern times, and the world in which we live is rather abstract, it is not easy to give a distinctive form to such a vast theme of “the world” and “space”. This is only an epistemological concept to show different representations via the course of impressionist art, and this world we think has been thought to be only revealed through images. His overlapping strokes with different intensity and strength contest this endlessly evolving world.
Meanwhile, blue is often regarded as the most abstract color that gives a feeling of rationality and intangibility rather than passion or reality. Yves Klein also used blue as the invisible and transcendental color that makes ideas visible. Choi also has produced many blue monochromatic works. According to him, blue is a fundamental and double-sided color that best fits the concept of paradox and balance he wishes to express. In other words, it is the color of the primary things such as sky, water, and earth, which contains dual emotions of hope and melancholy. Meanwhile, starting with The Section of Splendor series, the gold color often appears since 2018 as a complementary color of blue, used by the artist to express emissivity like the sun.
With the strokes continuously emerge and extinct, ‘I’ also set a meaning by flowing together, without exception, as a dot within them. This is the Aleph of paradox and it contains 'I' and 'one that contains everything'.
Ju Yeon Kang
Director Gallery JJ
Translated by Brett D.H.Lee
Instagram: @brettdhlee
@galleryjjseoul
Choi, Seungyoon (B.1984)
BFA, Seoul National University of Science and Technology
Selected Solo Exhibitions (2014~)
2020 Choi Seungyoon: The Aleph of Paradox, Gallery JJ, Seoul
2019 DRAW, L-gallery, Seoul
3, Artspace H, Seoul
Our Boundaries, Gallery JeEum, Seoul
2018 101 Individualities, Sono Art, Seoul
Diving over the Water, White Birch Gallery, Seoul
I Wanna Live, JY art gallery, Seoul
2017 Cross-section of the Moment, RESH Art Hall, Bundang
2016 Nonchalantly, Artspace H, Seoul
The Sadness is Beautiful, Artion, Seoul
Temperature of the Blue, Gallery Daon, Seoul
2015 Rising Fall, Artspace J cube_1, Bundang
2014 Beginning of Stop, YoungEun Museum, Gwangju, Gyeonggi-do
Selected Group Exhibitions (2014~)
2019 Heart 36.5, Gallery Aurum, GwangMyoung
Grand Palais Revelation Biennale, Paris, France
Milano Design Week 'ARTMINING-MILANO 2019', Palazzo Litta, Milan, Italy
'The midnight', Google, San Francisco, USA
2018 EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN, Gallery Toast
2017 Decisive Moment, Vivian Choi Gallery, Seoul
Tomorrow Artist, Gyeomjae Jungsun Art Museum, Seoul
Blue Flower, Gallery JJ, Seoul
New collection, YoungEun Museum, Gwangju, Gyeonggi-do
2014 Contemporary Art Tends to Read, Ami museum, Dangjin
Award and Residence
2017 Gyeomjae Jungsun Art museum Tomorrow Artist Prize
2016 1st Gold Line Residence Artist
2013~2014 Youngeun Art Residence
Collections
Youngeun Art Museum, Tom&Toms, Gold Line, Humax, Seoul Eastern District Court, RESH, Rose Dermatology, Fresh Plastic Surgery, PAT, Saatchi Art Collection (2016), Private Collections in the US, UK, Hong Kong, etc.
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