Contemplation Ⅰ

Concept

The artist Choi Daesun's works are an indulgence in a contemporary symbolic ritual aspiring to an eternal world transcending the limitation of time and space of this 3 dimensional world. The main medium he is using is newspaper, which he melts for a new space. A symbolic meaning of the newspaper in our own secular world, and an aspiration of the eternal world beyond the secular world which human beings have long inquired into, these two are the main elements consisting of Choi Daesun's work process, which is carried out like an ritual, through which he implies the other eternal world transcending the limitation of our secular world.

Since the era of modernity, the newspaper has been the most traditional and the most typical medium reflecting the secular world. The world is too immense and too complicating for our sense organ to apprehend it at first hand. Looking through this immense and complicating world, man is in need of a medium, as if we need a telescope or a microscope to see the distanced place or the minute world with which our sense cannot keep up. Over the centuries, the newspaper has performed the roll of a window through which we could see the secular world where we are living.

For a long time, people have viewed, reasoned and changed the world through the newspaper. Nowadays the emergences of broadcasting, the Internet and the SNS have been weakening the power of the newspaper. Even so, these new alternative media have the same essence as the newspaper - to mirror the world - so that they have the same essence as the newspaper. Thus, despite of the emergence of such alternative media, the newspaper still maintains its traditional representative nature.

Choi Daesun takes note of such representative nature of the newspaper mirroring the secular world. To him, the newspaper as a medium of such a primary entity becomes a representative object for a symbol referring to the secular world. Newspaper as the symbol of the secular world is torn down into small pieces and put in the water and passed through a long mature period by the artist. Through such a process, types and photos by means of which the secular world was described and expressed are all dropped out of paper and the newspaper turn into a sticky liquid gray object. It is similar to the purification process to wash away all secular anxieties in the way to the eternal world. Separate events in different times and spaces can be converged into a place. So to speak, the 3 dimensional events are turned into the 5 dimensional ones.

On such a new space over the scope of the 3 dimensional, Choi Daesun starts to spread his own narrative. His narrative appears as repetitive geometric patterns. Aiming to the eternal pattern like the mandala or the borubudur, his geometric patterns are more subjective and more liberal and are more true to the contemporary style, detaching themselves from traditional and conventional patterns like the mandala or the borubdur. The reason that the artist's paintings are liberal and up to date even when being directed to the eternal, unchangeable and absolute world where there is no birth and death, which exists in this secular, temporary and changing world, is that he performs such symbolic process not like the traditional patterns as in the mandala, but through a certain ritual process. To the artist, all miscellaneous thoughts and consciousnesses are sublimated to geometric patterns. Such patterns are no longer the ones in the secular world, but as a presentation of the eternal world give us a virtual experience to have a united feeling of the ego and the object.

It may be that the real world surpassing our birth and death has deeper dimensions and more complicating stages to the degree that we cannot imagine at all. But the artist Choi Daesun's new experiments can be a maximized expression of an aspiration as an artist, who wants to go beyond our limitation, can imagine. The outcome of a series of the process is a piece of painting. But it seems that what is more important is the process rather than its outcome. Because the artist's works are the outputs carried over by a performance performed by the artist as a performance artist or a performance of a certain sacred ritual as a kind of a priest until they come out.
-By Young Jay Lee (art critic)-