The novelist Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a famous parable about the creation of a map so perfect that it covered the entirety of the territory it was meant to represent. In the story, the map eventually decays over time, leaving only scattered fragments lying among the ruins.

In On Exactitude in Science, where this parable appears, Borges emphasizes the reality of the land itself as something more fundamental than the ruined remnants of the map. Jean Baudrillard, however, who cited the parable in his analysis of contemporary society, proposed an inverted myth: the map remains intact while reality disappears.

Such discourses point to the absurdity that arises whenever only one dimension prevails, whether the land (nature, objects, reality) or the map (civilization, language, fiction) is granted priority. The ideal of a map at a one-to-one scale seeks to eliminate the gap between reality and representation.

Yet this scientific passion is both impossible and productive of something apocalyptic. The empire perished because of the map; and once the territory itself has vanished, what purpose can the map still serve?

Such excessive passion applies not only to science but also to lives that become wholly substituted by art. The more intense the experience of immersion in which one becomes completely absorbed into the work, the more unfamiliar the return to everyday reality becomes. Artists who devote themselves entirely to their work while neglecting reality inevitably encounter difficulties.

Some press onward without considering the return journey and thereby bring hardship upon themselves. Yet if one must proceed, perhaps one must go far enough to realize the fiction one has created as reality itself. Immersion is dangerous, but it also produces meaningful results. The world of art is one into which one should not enter at all unless one is prepared to become immersed.

Paradoxically, the loss of distance from illusion produced by immersion creates a distance from reality. Choi Soo Jung’s work is structured around a game between these two dimensions: distance and the loss of distance. Mugan (No Interval) / Gonggan (Space) / Hyeongan (Threshold) addresses a certain interval—or the absence of one—that may exist between words and things, people and people, and countless other relationships. 

In this work, overlapping words occupy the same space and glow in different neon colors—white, red, and yellow. When illuminated in this manner, “mugan,” or the condition in which intervals disappear, causes language to cease functioning as a window or mirror through which reality can be viewed. Instead, the words appear as entangled objects.

Language itself acquires materiality and becomes the referent. Words and things are inevitably separated by a gap. Yet a passion for truth so intense that it seeks to eliminate this gap entirely produces only writing and speech that can no longer be read or heard. Just as extreme speed paradoxically creates a sensation of stillness, a frenzy of expression ultimately suspends expression itself.

The recognition of difference is a necessary condition for diverse forms of life and art, yet reality is often dominated by strong tendencies toward reduction and one-sidedness. Mugan / Gonggan / Hyeongan exemplifies the black-comedic paradox that characterizes Choi Soo Jung’s practice.

In Interminable Nausea, the artist sees “one of the Eight Hot Hells, where suffering is continuous and unceasing.” The loss of an appropriate distance—that is, the absence of difference—appears not as bliss, but as a form of hell.

The letterforms glow all the more apocalyptically against the dark background. In Choi Soo Jung’s work, an already desolate world is rendered even more desolate, yet a peculiar romanticism permeates it. Art protects the instinct to preserve warmth even amid the coldness of the world. Choi, however, does not rely on the human figure to convey this warmth.

Interminable Nausea consists of two square canvases (1 × 1 meter) painted in acrylic. Their surfaces are so pitch-black that, like black holes, no light seems capable of escaping them. The work juxtaposes one canvas entirely covered in black pigment with another black canvas produced through the repeated layering of transparent colors—green, purple, red, blue, yellow, and others.

The interval between these two blacks becomes visible only at the edges of the canvases facing one another. Unlike light, colors become black when combined. Black therefore contains within it the potential of many colors. The two blacks reveal their subtle difference only along the edges, where traces of paint remain visible.

Yet in reality, can we ever go far enough to fully perceive such a difference? In an age in which essence and foundations have disappeared, perhaps truth can only be approached through a continual exploration of surfaces. In Choi Soo Jung’s work, black composed of multiple colors appears as an allegory resembling a palimpsest layered over countless years.

Allegory does not transparently reflect its object; rather, it describes a condition in which meaning becomes opaque because of its distance from its origin. Allegory lies dormant within ancient ruins and archaeological sites, and in the postmodern era, where the myths of novelty and progress have lost their force, “the repressed allegorical impulse returns” (Craig Owens).

Just as the Greek root of allegory, “allos”, means “other,” a single color in Choi’s work continually shifts into another color. Infinite layers of difference converge into black, yet traces of those differences remain faintly visible along the edges. The repeatedly painted surface possesses a toughness akin to finely tanned leather.

This black square may also be compared to Malevich’s Black Square, insofar as it does not function as a window transparently reflecting something beyond itself, but instead refers only to itself. Malevich’s Black Square is widely regarded as the work that brought to an end the long tradition of representation in Western art. It was inspired by the stage curtain of the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913).

As in Choi Soo Jung’s exhibition 《A Song of Stone》 (2013), where paintings were installed within an empty theater—a deserted microcosm devoid of spectators—the world itself appears as a condensed stage, and all that can be seen upon it are layers upon layers of curtains.

For this was a peculiar stage from which actors were absent, where no narrative structure of beginning, development, climax, and resolution existed, and where even the omnipotent director governing everything had disappeared. If it is a stage at all, it is a stage not of representation but of becoming and events. As the history of perspective demonstrates, representation presupposes a perspectival stage.

A stage that presupposes an omnipotent presence behind it is closely bound to metaphysics. It contains a sacred position: the infinite vanishing point. For Choi Soo Jung, whose work repeatedly interrogates intervals themselves across various media and forms, such a stage is constructed only in order to be destroyed. Paradox stubbornly accompanies all of her works.

The exhibition—or stage—in which painting, sound, light, and other elements are mobilized is not a device for rendering the world more convincingly. Rather, it serves as a metaphorical space for stages within stages, frames within frames, and images within images. Through chains of echoes, messages become uncertain while only the structural apparatus remains visible.

The small motifs scattered throughout and around these structures possess no fixed place of their own. The apocalyptic flood of images would not appear substantially different even if they exchanged positions with one another.

They are paintings without depth, seeming liable to crumble away at the slightest touch. In Choi Soo Jung’s work, which bears characteristics of metafiction, illusion disappears and only surface remains. Yet it is a profound surface, a metaphor for a plane upon which everything becomes intermingled.

Apocalypse combines through stitching a series of phrases expressing human hope—“Gold will be found in the earth,” “A good omen,” “A welcome guest will arrive,” “Flowers blooming on an old tree,” “A perfect opportunity”—with images of disaster and fragments of broken sculptures. The visible stitches expose the gap between hope and reality, as well as between reality and fiction.

Reality is not a dialectical synthesis or reconciliation but rather a suturing together of heterogeneous elements. Just as Nietzsche contrasted objectivity with the will to power, the act of stitching together is itself a force, and so too is the force that tears those stitches apart. History is filled with paradoxical events that began with good intentions yet resulted in harmful outcomes.

Although much time has passed since the dawn of the Enlightenment, which sought to dispel darkness, the Enlightenment itself has become a myth—and, increasingly, a myth of catastrophe in postmodern society. Postmodernism, like the weathered fragments of sculpture that appear in Choi’s work, does not assume the appearance of unprecedented novelty.

In The Given as Future, a work consisting of a bicycle suspended from the gallery ceiling and a projected video placed before it, the artist’s enthusiasm for cycling becomes evident. The video, produced by attaching a camera to the spokes of a bicycle wheel and riding along a riverside at dawn, continuously rotates streetlights and dark shadows upside down.

The alternation of light and shadow evokes the endlessly recurring cycle of day and night, suggesting that life itself unfolds in a similar manner. Viewed from the perspective of a wheel rather than a human being, the world reveals its true character through acceleration. Although it appears to move forward, it ultimately speaks of a world of infinite recurrence.

Whether eternal return becomes an opportunity for abundance or degenerates into mechanical repetition that produces only exhaustion determines the dramatic contrast in our lives. Flamingo consists of paintings modeled after the structure of circular ceiling frescoes. According to the artist, a ceiling painting is “a painting without up, down, left, or right.”

The red flamingos depicted within the various sections divided by brickwork traditionally symbolize fire, passion, and the rise and fall of civilizations, yet Choi is less interested in these symbolic meanings than in the structural qualities of the image itself.

Like a view glimpsed through an opening in the sky, ceiling paintings maximize the effect of illusion. They maintain only minimal contact with reality while containing numerous worlds within themselves. Sweet Home presents images melting beneath a light fixture. Objects positioned too close to a light source do more than absorb warmth; their very properties seem to dissolve and transform.

This recalls the principle of uncertainty in modern physics, whereby the act of observation alters the object being observed. The work stages the idea that excessive proximity creates a kind of infernal state of “no interval,” setting this condition within the most private of spaces: the home. As Freud observed, the home is simultaneously the most intimate and the most uncanny of places.

In Ich Komme Bald!, an old faded postcard bears the message “I’ll be there soon!” written in red. The work suggests a temporality that has become ambiguous. The “soon” inscribed on the postcard has already become part of the past, and the anticipation embedded in that promise has likely disappeared as well. Beneath imagery that appears as innocent as illustrations from a children’s storybook lies a reality that invariably disappoints.

Small kitsch objects such as picture postcards contain wishes for sweet worldly happiness, yet they simultaneously reflect a reality in which such happiness is largely absent. The more bitter reality becomes, the sweeter fantasy appears. Trickster, a work composed of hundreds of mask images painted at the scale of hwatu cards, presents the figure of a clown whose mask, once removed, reveals only another mask beneath it.

The clown’s identity lies not in a stable self but in transformation itself. Like fiction or falsehood, it is multiple rather than singular, unlike reality or truth. As such, it is a character perfectly suited to Choi Soo Jung’s metafictional universe of stages within stages, frames within frames, and images within images. Through playful mischief, it entangles the order of a world structured out of chaos.

The small portraits, rendered at the scale of playing cards, are governed by the strict rules peculiar to the realm of play. Within this magic circle—the designated space of play—taboos are transgressed. The simultaneous baseness and sacredness produced by such transgressions become possible only through the metaphorical realm of art.

Yet, as religion and many other spiritual traditions suggest, powerful fantasies can become reality. The seventeenth-century playwright Molière once remarked that “when people gather together to laugh, the wisest among them may well be the maddest.” The mask, which invites the presence of the Other, is closely associated with madness.

As seen in Choi Soo Jung’s 'mineral painting' series, where the points of entry and exit remain uncertain, these various stages evoke enclosed spaces in which madness is confined. The clown, dressed in garments patched together from many colors and performing handstands, is the protagonist of an inverted world.

As the king of an anarchic space-time temporarily inaugurated between one order and the next, only to be executed once order is restored, this figure long served as a metaphor for the artist, extending even into the modern era.

By casting the protagonist of an absurd world not as a human being or a god but as an Other who playfully violates taboos and behaves with irreverent freedom, Choi Soo Jung mitigates the tragic atmosphere that might otherwise prevail.

References

• [비평] 세상과의 적절한 거리설정을 위한 소우주 속 실험들
  [Critique] Experiments within a Microcosm for Establishing the Proper Distance from the World