Choi Goen Is Punching Through Walls at Frieze Seoul

Dinosaurs have always fascinated me. These creatures dominated the primordial earth, but now are gone, leaving only fossils as evidence of their presence. Whenever I see these displayed in a museum, I wonder about what remains after everything else has vanished. What will endure from today’s world? If COEX burned down, if Seoul fell into ruin, what would testify to our existence? That my imagination tends in this direction may stem from a slight disillusionment with the city.

At Frieze, there are works by Choi Goen instead of dinosaur fossils. Choi has become known for her series that involves gathering, cutting and refashioning secondhand white goods into abstract forms. Apart from their time-worn pallidity, brought about by a natural process of aging, her ‘White’ series shares a kinship with fossils as ontological evidence. Choi travels the outskirts of the city, gathering these materials like a practised archaeologist. The further she ventures from Seoul, the more outdated and virtually functionless the appliances she retrieves. She refers to these materials as products of stratification with monumental qualities.

Anyone driving along the Seoul Ring Expressway, which encircles the city like a cell membrane, can witness transnational recycling facilities mushrooming all around. These sites are fueled by the life cycles and changing economic circumstances of the city’s saturated population – particularly young students and newlyweds. Workers of countless nationalities dismantle, sort and load the corpses of refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines and dishwashers into containers destined for ‘emerging’ countries, while the logos of global electrical giants adorn apartment buildings in the background.

In a city like Seoul, it’s not unusual for things we order at midnight to be delivered to our doorstep before we leave for work the next morning. People are no longer amazed that this is possible; instead, they are shocked and angry when this becomes impossible due to strikes, for example. The city’s nights are no longer the time of wandering ghosts or spirits but rather the time of shadowy servants of material infrastructure, their darkness colonized by our daytime. To be honest, I’m cautious about using such terms since I know nothing about colonial ambitions, but it’s disconcerting to sense a material foundation that I can’t touch beneath my seemingly perfect, technologically connected life. This is not an ethical or political frustration but a sensory failure. I suspect Choi’s work also stems from such frustrations.

In 2019, when she exhibited her sculpture of a freestanding air-conditioner shell in the annex courtyard of the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), which is housed in the former Belgian consulate, I wondered how it appeared to the caffeine-infused office workers in the bustling streets of Gangnam. White Home Wall: Welcome (2024), one of two large-scale sculptures installed at COEX, similarly arrived through the city’s narrowed arteries and aged wrinkles. Its perfect, polished surface reflects both the desire for self-expression and institutional demands.

Meanwhile, her series using copper and brass piping began relatively recently. These materials are perhaps the most ubiquitous yet entirely invisible of all those around us. Choi’s pipes pierce the building’s skin, stitching wall to wall, surface to surface. In the three-person exhibition ‘Yolk’, at CYLINDER gallery in Seoul in 2023, Choi’s pipes extended from their pedestal, attacking the purity of sculpture. They are unconcerned with transporting water or gas; they exist to prove themselves, thereby proving the world, incorporating other materials like cement, concrete, glass and polyurethane as they go. The movement of the pipes is variable and dynamic, deriving from the force of pressing, tearing, splitting, bending, and cutting. This force is no longer constrained by the limits of the human body, can no longer be considered ‘corporeal’.

In 2019, when the ‘White’ series was showcased at SeMA, Choi also had a solo exhibition at Thomas Park New York. Its curator, Park Mimi, rewrote the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ (1915). ‘The houses are haunted / By white night-gown’ became ‘The (Korean) apartments are haunted by white air conditioners.’ She continued: ‘In Korean, a wife is “a-nae”, which means an “indoor person”. [...] It is not surprising to see at the center of Korean women’s desires new refrigerators, new air conditioners, along with new big apartments. You are living in a house of desire, specially built by other people; you might realize at one point you don’t even know what you really desire other than cutting a fridge in half.’ Park captures Choi’s shrewd, preemptive approach as a Korean woman artist. But I think this sentiment also aligns with the general outlook of our era. The act of cutting vertically to transition to a horizontal order reflects a new generation’s attitude toward place and space.

Since the 1990s, contemporary art in Korea has been significantly influenced by the biennials in Gwangju, Seoul and Busan, and primarily shaped by spectacular installations that are intricately tied to cultural symbols. Recently, though, young artists in Seoul have begun to challenge this trend. While using the technical legacy of previous generations, they don’t want to blend in with a space but to establish an equal order with the other objects within it. They seek to break away from treating material as a relational or historical ingredient. Choi is one of these young ‘sculptors’.

As a curator, I believe that good art should challenge the way we see and use materials and media. That is both the virtue and the duty of art. Today, almost everywhere is filled with sensors that define me by my scale, depth, velocity and material, but none of which asks who I truly am. The experience of living in such a city is both painful and intriguing. And, suddenly, it will make us want to cut the fridge in half or ram pipes through the walls.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week Seoul 2024 under the title ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’

Further Information

Frieze Seoul, COEX, 4 – 7 September 2024.

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_{Main image: Choi Goen with White Home Wall: Welcome, 2024}