2017 Art Sonje Project #5: Chan Sook Choi – Re – move
September 1 – 24, 2017
Art Sonje Center Project Space
2017 Art Sonje Project #5: Chan Sook Choi – Re – move
Art Sonje Center presents 2017 Art Sonje Project#5: Chan Sook Choi – Re – move from 09.01 to 9.24.
“Lift me to the window to the picture image unleash the ropes tide weights of stones.” – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée
Like Oscar Wilde’s statement “Most people are other people”, the project Re-move does not keep a welcoming stance on a matchless identity, but deconstructs and hybridizes the concept of the ‘pure’ culture. The comfort women to Japanese soldiers, Choi’s Japanese grandmother who married a Korean laborer dispatched to Japan just before Korea’s liberation from Japan and moved back to Korea, and the grandmothers of ‘Yangji-ri’ who migrated to the DMZ town — whom we encounter precisely where Chansook Choi returns — keep their distance from a form that appeals to the power of the dominant identity, while also rejecting the collective identity as ‘victims’. In explaining ‘le Tour’ in relation to the universality of the ‘blackness’ of the black slaves of the Carribbeans, Edourd Glissant said the following about the idea of ‘awakening themselves of their differences in a different place, and thus leaving returning again’:
“We must return there. There is no detour without retour (return). It’s not about a return to the unchanging identity of a being towards original dream, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish.”
While removing the illusory unity of identity, or fate, Choi’s Re-move also demonstrates the world’s conflicts and brutality perpetuated by the illusion of identity or fate, not through epistemological means but through artistic research. By focusing on women who have lost their grounds or have been removed in HIS-story, it attempts to show how other identities and values pertaining to human kind, such as class, gender, occupation, language, politics and ethics, are being disregarded. The project ultimately asks the question whether there is any validity in the assumption that identity can be uniquely categorized by religion, culture and nationality.
About the artist
Chan Sook Choi recived her bachelor’s degree in Visual Communications and Media Art as well as her master’s degree at University der Künste in Berlin, Germany. Choi won the grand prize at the international media art competition hosted by Bibliart and Berlin Pergamon Museums in 2008, and was selected the artist of Nafog project in 2009, a young artist support program sponsored by the City of Berlin. In Korea, Choi presents her work in Private Collection as a selected artist of the NarT, a young artist support program sponsored by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture in 2010. Since then, Choi was also selected Tomorrow’s Artist by Sungok Art Museum in 2012, the Young Artist Prize at Gallery Loop in 2015, and Young Artist Support Program at Seoul Museum of Art in 2017. Choi has also been conducting her narratology experimentations on psychological migration and the human memory as a medium through a multi and interdisciplinary methodological approach, in performances at the National Theater of Korea, New York Queens Museum, Sacheon Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, REAL DMZ PROJECT, and Berlin Grimm Museum, etc.