Installation view of 《Air Pages》 (A-Lounge Contemporary, 2024) © A-Lounge Contemporary

She draws the curtains closed to stop the sun from snatching away her fleeting sleep. After a few hours, when she draws back the thick, full curtain, a new day begins. Choi Sujin opens the curtains, lets the rays of the rising sun fall on her skin, and notes the breath passing in and out of her lungs while greeting the new day. She compares the curtains—which she opens and closes day in and day out—to a “page.”

Her habit of drawing back the curtains as morning arrives and beginning her day is no different than turning a page in a book to the next story. A curtain is a page; a day is a story. As if groping through the books on her bookshelf, looking for sentences that she has missed, Choi Sujin awakens the memories of past days that have become fuzzy in the early morning hours by allowing the light to pour in through the curtains, extending the “day” further.

“Air pages” can’t be seen by the eye or touched with one’s hand. In fact, it’s unclear if they exist(ed) in the first place. Nevertheless, they are bundles of time that have found their place in the mind. Choi Sujin creates edited compilations of these everyday moments and memories by stitching together the fragments of paper that are each a “day.”

Consequently, her paintings are populated by the objects and animals that make up her real-world surroundings, from the plants and pet dogs that she raises at her home to a lover’s treasured guitar and audio equipment, the mole and woodpecker she commonly sees on a walking path, a nameless girl and monster in a book of paintings by artists of past times, clothes she once enjoyed wearing, and the fruit lying on her table.

These fragments of her life are scattered about her paintings, as if one could play a game of “spot the difference” between reality and paintings. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that her paintings are like the faithful recordings of a diary. To call her work “everyday life” would be romantic, and to call them “records” would not comport with reality.

Rather, like a scene out of a dream, these completely disconnected moments appear all jumbled together; this tangle of moments flows through the foundation of the painting.

Now, let’s turn to focus on the artist’s perception of time. Her earlier works, as well, reveal a preoccupation with time. Her ‘Rainbow Studio’ series (2015–2022) is emblematic of this interest. Choi Sujin became transfixed with color. Her belief was that the process of a painter choosing a color occurred in the realm of pure intuition and could not be explained by logic.

She felt that this process occurred within something like the realm of fate, where the absolute arbitrator of color whispers the color to be used next into the artist’s ear. She imagined some secret behind-the-scenes space where colors are grown before reaching the hands of the artist. Just as the beads of sweat planted by the farmer grow to become crops that are used to produce food, Choi Sujin imagined that out there, somewhere, there must be a “color farm” where pigments are raised.

Following from this, Choi Sujin interrogated the destinies of all eight natural colors that can be created from organic substances and then personified them, depicting them as workers who fulfill their callings as living beings. Put differently, the artist granted these colors an existence in time and space to enable them to come alive. In this context, the ‘Rainbow Studio’ series can be regarded as a fable about the birth of color.

This series came to an end in 2023. These manifestations of color, which often appeared in the form of vivacious women, vanished, and in their place appeared a plethora of fragments of everyday life. Moreover, the illusionary shapes that once followed the rules of the physical world have melted into mush, invading each other’s discrete spaces.

Certain objects retain their defined shapes, yet the rough brush strokes and cloth patterns break down the boundaries between spaces and times, and ruptures begin to spread through the space-time of the paintings. The paintings no longer depict a specific moment arrested in time; instead, they show a “process” in movement. Henri Bergson spoke of time as “duration”—that is, the unending process of “becoming something.”

Isn’t this, in fact, the true essence of time? Time is nothing more than the path of movement stretching from a future that still does not exist back to a past that already does not exist. Nevertheless, time still functions as a fundamental frame that structures existence.

In this way, in the absolute sense, artist Choi Sujin approaches time as both an impossible manifestation of reality and the first condition imposed on life, which is both a blessing and a curse. Consequently, it is unsurprising to note that she often looks back on the past from the perspective of death. Indeed, this is because time—which cannot be undone by human strength—holds within it both fear and anxiety.

Finally, although Choi Sujin sees time as the horizontal sequence of past, present, and future, she also understands time as a vertical structure formed from the accumulation of the sunrises, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights that have been repeated billions of times since the birth of the earth. Consider the title of the painting Peach Scent Rainy Afternoon. Here, the word “afternoon” does not refer to a particular moment or day.

Rather, it refers to the gathered mass of the uncountable number of afternoons that humanity has passed through. It is the point at which the rainy afternoons of antiquity and the rainy afternoons of yesterday meet.

In this way, Choi Sujin implies that our lives reflect not only the personal histories of each individual being since their birth but also the verticality of the memories of all the life that flows through human DNA. Time is characterized by a mutual penetration that is both horizontal and vertical. The dynamic scenario of life is written on the “air page.”

References