K.NOTe no.51
Yoonsuk Choi
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K.NOTe no.51
Yoonsuk Choi
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Publisher Total Museum Press Pyungchang 32gil 10, Jongno-gu, Seoul Korea (03004) Tel. 82-2-379-7037 total.museum.press@gmail.com Director Jooneui Noh Editor in Chief Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoon Jeong Koh Coordinator Taeseong Yi Educator Haeun Lee Intern Jisu Hong, Sooeon Jeong Designer Heiin Son Sponsor Arts Council Korea Date of Publication 2018.07 Š Author and artist The reproduction of the contents of this magazine in whole or in part without written permission if prohibited.
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Memento Mori Exhibition view, Artist's father's camera and tapes
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Thank You, Mum!, Hand writing letter, 24.5Ă—17cm, 1989
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Leaves Single channel video, stereo, color, video installation, 8'49", 2017
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Bed Scene Single channel video, color, 01'51", 2012
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Chronicle of Mr. Kim (in collaboration with Ingeun Kim) Single channel video, stereo, BW, 09'27", 2013
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K.NOTe #51 Life Attitude is Art: On Yoonsuk Choi YoonJeong Koh Editor, Total Museum Press “Live in your head.” This is the subtitle assigned by Harald Szeemann to his 1969 work When Attitudes Become Form. The exhibition made a highly innovative contribution to the later establishment of conceptual art with its departure from the white cube format to show processoriented art, the use of materials to show materiality, displays on the floor with no support or with dangling strings visible, and the demonstration of the process why which various documents became artworks in and of themselves. If When Attitudes Become Form offered an unfiltered glimpse at materials rather than artworks as finished objects, or at the process by which an artist’s work in created, then Yoonsuk Choi’s work focuses on showing the “trivial parts” of life. By turning its attention to the life within the process, it maximizes its presentation from the artist’s self-exploratory perspective. People often harbor misunderstandings about the profession of “artist.” They believe artists to have a rather emotional temperament, or expect them to have outstanding skills at painting. This is partly due to the fact that the artist’s life is not open to them, and to the fact that artists themselves can be difficult to encounter. As a response to this, Choi applies the lens continuously to himself as an artist, questioning what attitude an artist should maintain in his or her life. Because the results of his work constitute a series of fragments, Choi’s products as an artist may at first glance be assigned to a few defined genre frameworks -- “oddball collector,” perhaps, or “performance artist.” But the tenacious self-analysis that he applies to fragments of life force us to consider once again what sort of “eye” the artist must possess. 14
Chronicle of Mr. Kim (in collaboration with Ingeun Kim) Single channel video, stereo, BW, 09'27", 2013
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The Observer’s Attitude Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Yoonsuk Choi’s artistic process is his attitude as an observer. As an undergraduate, he was told his pictures were too small, and advised to “build a canvas and make a big painting.” The suggestion was that he should try to produce work on a larger scale. But rather than focusing on the size of the canvas or tangible art materials, he began instead to adopt the observer’s attitude itself as his subject. Choi spent the period between 2009 and 2012 working on Mass of Year, a piece composed of numerous receipts weaved together. The receipts went some way in showing how he had lived as an exploration of the artist. For the piece, he cut a year’s worth of receipts into thin, yarn-like pieces and spent approximately a month and a half weaving them into a tapestry as though they were thread. Had the artist continued with work along these lines, his pieces might simply have been seen as the products of a paranoid hoarder. But Choi would go onto to show different products of selfexploration, including Untitled: 8 Hours of Drawing(2011), the performance Chronicle of Mr. Kim(2013), and video piece Particle Diary(2013). Like Mass of the Year series, Particle Diary is a video produced by assembling small objects collected or owned by the artist. Candy wrappers, pieces of scrap paper, and the like pass by in such a brief instant that it is difficult to tell what they are. It is an excellent illustration of how tiny the “extremes” are in the process of life that is the focus of the artist’s interest. It may be described as a methodical assemblage of the artist’s tiny actions from day to day as he personally classifies and archives Chinese food delivery stickers and other trivial objects. Music has been another focus of the artist’s ongoing interest. Signs of a process of combination with musical elements are visible everywhere in his work. A case in point is Chronicle of Mr. Kim, 16
in which the artist combines sounds with a generational story one might experience in South Korea as he ponders his family, and his father and grandfather in particular. The use of sounds and rhythms adds a sense of levity to what might otherwise be a dull exploration of daily life. Some of the parts are rehearsed, others improvised, as the fathers and father’s fathers of today’s generation are brought together with tiny sounds of plodding, brisk strides, and droning. Choi’s shoes, which serve as part of his performance costume for the work, are a prized part of his collection, something he has been unable to let go of for many years. As the father rises in the morning and prepares to go to work, the simple sounds on the video are overlaid with the noise of the morning alarm and whoops of “hurray” as the scene changes to the daily working routine. It’s the sort of everyday language we tend not to notice, yet as they thread through the artist’s sounds, the words transform into rhythmic performance elements rather than tossed-off phrases. The process itself becomes a metaphor for Yoonsuk Choi’s work as an artist, and the way he develops art out of the trivial and extreme everyday elements.
The Artist’s Life and Work More so than in his own work, this observer’s attitude toward daily life, and the artist’s own life in particular, reaches its peak with Choi’s involvement as curator and artist in the exhibition Life and Work, Work and Life(2014). In filming videos for other artists, Choi worked with them to research an exhibition aimed at showing the artist’s everyday existence. Some of the artists in the exhibition ritualistically performed 108 bows before beginning of the work, while others headed out to Bangsan Market(industrial subsidiary market) regularly for their shopping. Or at least he thought they were visiting Bangsan Market: when a camera is attached to their wrists and the movements of their hands are tracked, the same items and gestures are discovered, unbeknownst to their artists 17
themselves. In one case, Choi followed an artist all the way to Daegu to observe the working process and ended up hearing a real estate spiel about the excellent feng shui. Although the format of the exhibition could be described as consisting of the research efforts that go into completing art work and an examination of the perspectives of observer and participant, it can also be said to coincide with Choi’s own approach as an artist. In other words, it presents the journey toward the realization of an exhibition through the assemblage of images of Choi working in his daily life to show his characteristics as an artist alongside the various fragments that take place, unconsciously and unbeknownst to him.
Unassailable Assets Conversely, Yoonsuk Choi has also sought out all the pictures he could of himself sleeping after drinking, which he compiled into Sleep Book(2015). It is an archive of himself, produced by gathering individual photographs taken by friends and acquaintances between 2004 and 2015 from Cyworld(South Korean social networking site) pages and camera phone. Passing through these individual moments when the author was sleeping, the view is given a glimpse into the process whereby a person’s recorded habits become a clue toward reading that individual. These aspects -- the habit of recording, the observer’s attitude, and the hoarder’s mindset -- would come together in an exhibition titled Unassailable Assets(2015), which was shown at Space O'NewWall. The things included here are trivial moments that hint at the days spent by the artist, ranging from letters written in his childhood to items from his collection, songs crafted from collected voices, memories from abroad, and a wall pasted over with hairs and sloughed skin gathered from his own bed. The theme of the “everyday” has been a highly provocative resource for all artists ever since Marcel Duchamp called a 18
urinal “art” in the 1910s. Minimalist artists explored the material properties of steel plates, an industrial material; sculpture was no longer a special work raised on a pedestal, but items laid on the floor. The rectangular frames have been changed to different shapes; the white canvas has been repainted in white so that it is indistinguishable in color from the wall. Meanwhile, the viewers become participants in a kind of performance, where artist and community collaborate in one boundary-breaking effort. Where the artist’s creative process was once special, the process that stands out these days in one aimed at establishing connections with daily life. Artists today are no longer trapped inside the studio. They are engaging in all sorts of experiments beyond simply filling a white canvas with paint, while their process works in various ways to narrow the gap with the viewer. Yoonsuk Choi’s work is more than simply arranging a series of random and heterogenous things; it involves rediscovering fragments that have escaped our attention, repositioning the unattended periphery where it can capture our attention. In his attention to exceedingly tiny fragments, he may be seen as reversing the process of land art -- where the works are so large that the viewer expresses confusion at the positioning of the part once inside of it -- and thereby unsettling the prejudices the viewers carry with them toward the “everyday.” Changing the viewers’ long-held prejudices toward the everyday may be one of the tasks every artist is obligated to tackle; in Yoonsuk Choi’s case, it is a matter of constantly observing these new attempts, uncovering them and linking them together. And by presenting new compositions as a video artist with these sounds and scenes, he shows that these processes are more than just a list. Yoonsuk Choi is not an artist who can be pigeonholed within any one genre. Through his various experiments, he offers a clue as to how he can be defined: as an artist with a unique observer’s perspective. 19
Memento Mori, Exhibition view-screening
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Memento Mori Single channel video, stereo, color, 17'33", 2017
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Glass Mirror Relay lecture performance, production work, 100min, 2015
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A Song for Maternity Single channel video, stereo, color, 12'09", 2014
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A Song for Maternity Exhibition view
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Sleep Book (Reading desk) Wood, 45x125x120cm, 2015
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Sleep Book Offset print, hand binding, 29.7×21×3.9cm, 2015
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Come Heavy Sleep, Come Wool-microfiber, 200×140cm, 2017
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Bed Scene Wall installation, offset print, 250×1020×30cm, 2015
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Yoonsuk Choi Yoonsuk Choi is a Seoul based artist. His practice is mainly dealing with his immediate surroundings; habitual gestures and the notion of universal Cartesian time and also he is interested in the tension between the personal life of an artist and artist's works. He is currently developing his art practice via approaching to various mediums such as performance, audio-visual materials and curatorial practice.
YoonJeong Koh YoonJeong Koh earned a master’s degree from the Ewha Womans University College of Art and Design and completed an interdisciplinary doctoral program in art education at Seoul National University. She worked as a collaborating curator at Gallery Koo and served as chief editor at the art publishing company Graphite on Pink. She published the first three editions of the art mook GRAVITY EFFECT. Her interests include contemporary art environments, public and community art, and performance art. She is current working as visiting chief editor at Total Museum of Art and is involved in planning a number of different efforts.
Yoonsuk Choi