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until 22.11. | #0842ARTatBerlin | Grimmuseum shows from 23rd October 2016 the exhibition ” Re Move” by the artist Chan Sook Choi.
Grimmuseum is pleased to present the solo exhibition Re move by Chan Sook Choi from 23 October to 12 November 2016.
In search of a new relation to the world, surrealists have dreamed of reinventing language and images. At the heart of this endeavor lies the liberation of things from their original context, like extracting single words from a greater body of work and combining them into spontaneous and abstract constellations. This is an attempt to understand both the inner meaning and the contextual meaning of things, comparable to the idea of semantics and pragmatics in linguistics. People who are far-removed from their homeland and build their lives in a foreign country can be seen as a manifestation of this idea of dislocation.
For her works presented in the exhibition Re move (a double meaning for both “to move again” and “to eliminate”), the Korean artist Chan Sook Choi has been working with comfort women (forced prostitutes in Japanese brothels during Second World War), as well as elderly Japanese women who migrated from Japan to Korea after marrying Korean laborers drafted after Japan’s colonial period.
The starting point of Choi’s work is her journey to Japan where she tried to find and document places that appeared in the photo albums of her grandmother, the only migrant in Choi’s family. While the series of works on display were brought about from the artist’s interest in understanding her own identity as a woman in the grand scheme of things, they also contain elements that were “captured in a wide net” as she traced the footsteps of her grandmother’s journey.
Choi left Berlin and moved to Yangji-ri, a so-called Minbuk Village, located north of the South Korean civilian access control line (CACL) near the demilitarized zone (DMZ). The village sits on flat land with a clear line-of-sight to and from North Korea and was originally built for strict control over civilian access in addition to its propagandic effect. Designed after Israeli kibbutz communities, houses in the village are similar to terraced houses in which two families live in different units under the same roof. The homes were intentionally designed to appear as single houses to boast the superiority of South Korean rural villages against their North Korean counterparts.
What notably captured the artist’s attention in Yangji-ri was not modern propaganda but points of light from everyday objects such as street lights, welding machines, space heaters, crosses, or curtains. Choi refers to these as stars that act as coordinates to find herself. She searches for a language that does not yet exist and that expresses her experiences of language as inadequate signs. By tying together traces of the comfort women, Japanese immigrants, and the village of Yangji-ri, the exhibition moves far-removed narratives and eliminates the distance between them.
Chan Sook Choi graduated with a double-major in Visual Communication (Diplom), Experimental Media Arts (Master) and a Meisterschüler degree in Media Art with Prof. Maria Vedder from the University of Arts Berlin. She won the grand prize of the International Media Art Award hosted by Bibliates & Berlin Pergamon Museum in 2008, followed by a selection in 2009 as an artist supported by NaFöG, a City-Berlin funding program for emerging artists. In Korea, 2010 she was selected as the New Artist Trend (NArT) by Seoul Art Foundation and had the first encounter with the audience by producing performances such as “Private Collection” hosted by Namsan Art Center in the same year. Afterwards, she was selected as the Artist of Tomorrow by Sungkok Art Museum in 2011 and as a New-rising Artist at Alternative Space Loop in 2013. Her works are exhibited internationally including the National Theater in Korea, the Queens Museum in New York City and the Sacheon Gallaxy Contemporary.
Vernissage: Saturday, 22nd October 2016, 02:00-06:00 p.m.
Exhibition period: Sunday, 23rd October – Tuesday, 22nd November2016
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Image caption: Chan Sook Choi, WE remember ME, digital photograph, 2016. Courtesy the artist.
Exhibition Chan Sook Choi – Grimmuseum – Kunst in Berlin ART at Berlin
