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Choe U-Ram is widely known as an artist who creates “anima machines,” or mechanical life-forms. With kinetic works that showcase imaginative artistry and an exceptional sense of form, he has drawn attention not only in Korea but also at leading museums, galleries, and biennials abroad. Since his first solo exhibition in 1998, his sustained interest in movement has driven a practice that demonstrates not only formal and technological advances over the past fifteen years, but also expansion and evolution in content. His 2012 solo exhibition clearly revealed the broadened spectrum of his work.

While preparing for his first solo exhibition in Korea in a decade, the artist seems to have taken time to look back on his practice. Spanning works from drawings he made at age seven to recent pieces, the show offered a cyclical loop that returned to the starting point of his art and asked, “What is art to me?” Like the serpent biting its own tail in the work Ouroboros, a linear concept of time is dismantled and the past, present, and future interlock ceaselessly. Found in nearly all civilizations and noted by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, the ouroboros is an ancient religious symbol that signifies the union of opposites. Choe’s art exists precisely within a process that seeks harmony and balance—between machine and nature, myth and science, emotion and reason—just as the circular motion of Ouroboros dissolves binaries and reveals a state in which opposites are integrated. “Cycle” and “expansion”: with these two words, we can approach Choe U-Ram’s “here and now.”


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From childhood, Choe loved science-fiction cartoons and anything that moved. He often lost track of time drawing, and he was particularly struck by a jewelry design that reproduced a heartbeat at the exhibition Salvador Dalí Sculpture he once visited with his mother. But there was something unusual about his early drawings: even when he drew robots, he did not focus on embellishing their exterior. Instead, he outlined the forms and then filled the interior by imagining what lay within. At seven, he drew mechanical components inside a whale rather than organs. One might say the meeting of machine and life had already begun.

The artist’s long-standing imagination of mechanical life-forms is closely tied to a deep interest in nature. As with countless artists in history, nature is also Choe’s model for art. Drawn for years to moving things, he seeks to recreate the awe he feels in nature by animating machines. A frequent viewer of nature documentaries, Choe says, “Through machines, I wanted to show the beauty of nature.” He speaks of the reverence he feels when witnessing the vastness of nature and the tenacious vitality of diverse flora and fauna. Indeed, his works to date present images in which nature and machine intersect. Through his imagination, forms of insects, fish, and plants are intricately fused with engineered mechanical structures, furnished with plausible Latin scientific names, and accompanied by texts about these life-forms.

He began attaching narratives to his anima machines in 2002, adding texts that describe imaginary mechanical organisms, akin to the explanatory passages about plants and animals in National Geographic. As viewers read these texts, they are drawn into imagining that Choe’s anima machines might actually exist somewhere on Earth. Narrative endows the work with more potent life. At times, the narrative is site-specific, tailored to the space in which the work is installed—in other words, a life-form is created to suit its habitat. A case in point is Opertus Lunula Umbra (2008), exhibited at Tate Liverpool. The work began from a vision of moonlight reflected on the water at Liverpool’s docks and was accompanied by a description of “a life-form composed of structures and machines from sunken ships of the past and ships of the present.”

In recent works, the narratives have grown richer. Choe’s conceptual terrain extends beyond imaginings of anima machines to myth, religion, and contemporary society. The critical perspective that began with his master’s thesis, “A Study on the Expression of Mechanical Life-Forms Through a Critique of Machine-Scientific Civilization” (1998), has moved beyond fictional narrative toward a more direct engagement with reality. A common thread in works that can be grouped under the theme of real society is a hint of nihilistic gaze. Consider Merry-Go-Round. In the center of a dark exhibition space stands a miniature carousel that plays a melody.

Unlike earlier works whose thousands of mechanical parts are exposed, this piece presents a different format. As we approach, drawn by the nostalgia-tinged beauty of its form, the carousel slowly begins to move. It accelerates, soon spinning frenetically until its recognizable form disappears altogether. It seems to be raging madly. At this point, viewers may feel a tinge of fear: in our memories, carousels at amusement parks never spin fast; they revolve at a leisurely, comforting pace. Here, however, a speed machine in wild, breakneck motion is thrust before our eyes, betraying that expectation. Disconcerted, viewers are led to recall our bitter reality. Merry-Go-Round may well be a portrait of a society that relentlessly demands speed without end.

There are also works that slightly step away from the perfect beauty characteristic of his earlier pieces, such as Scarecrow and Pavilion. The towering, four-meter-high ghost-like Scarecrow, made of black electrical cable, embodies humans lured by the ever-expanding system of social networks and its illusions. It compels us to reflect on the current moment when we cannot put our smartphones down for even a second and feel secure only when connected to someone. If you become “Facebook friends” with someone you have never actually spoken to and habitually check their trivial daily life online, does that truly make you their friend? The sense of emptiness seen in Scarecrow continues in Pavilion. A cheap black plastic bag floating above a lavish golden ornamental structure invites reflection on a contemporary society where, amid an overabundance of everything, there is an equivalent void.


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In an interview some years ago, Choe said, “I want to move from hardware to emotion and spirit.” Today, he is indeed moving in that direction. Thinking back on that interview while looking at his work, one recalls the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Filmmaker Werner Herzog shot prehistoric cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in southern France; while the Paleolithic people’s extraordinary powers of observation and depiction from 32,000 years ago are astonishing, what lingers is an elderly archaeologist’s phrase “Homo spiritualis.” The cave paintings show that from time immemorial, humans have been beings who ceaselessly pursue the spiritual and the unseen.

An artist at the forefront of cutting-edge kinetic or robotic art, Choe U-Ram now seeks to speak about an invisible realm of spirit. Alongside this pursuit, his works—long marked by meticulous detail, astonishing technical realization, and the formal beauty of perfection—move beyond mere spectacles. Viewers initially captivated by the external appearance of the anima machines, presented with superb formal sensibility, ultimately experience a curious emotional resonance as they are led to reflect on our familiar reality and our present. When I asked what he considers art to be, the artist answered: “That which makes humans human—that is art,” and “the energy that flows between the object and the human.” Is human history truly an ouroboros, a structure devouring its own tail? Choe’s answer somehow does not sound unrelated to the attitude of the Paleolithic person who painted the cave walls.

Refusing to linger in the realm of imaginary anima machines, Choe continues to pursue an emotional impact through what is interior. He has an exhibition scheduled for later this year. When we met in July, in the midst of preparations, he said he was “completely emptied out.” Perhaps he is still the curious seven-year-old eagerly drafting robot blueprints. An artist who wears the facets of scientist, engineer, and inventor, and also a storyteller who spins myriad tales, Choe U-Ram leaves us eager to see how his next exhibition will fill space with imagination and artistic practice.

References

• [비평] 최우람의 근작에 나타난 순환과 확장 구조
  [Critique] Cycles and Expansions in Choe U-Ram’s Recent Works)