Installation view © Chan Sook Choi

Art Sonje Center presents 《2017 Art Sonje Project #5: Chan Sook Choi – Re – move》 from 09.01 to 9.24.

“Lift me to the window to the picture image unleash the ropes tide weights of stones.” – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée

Like Oscar Wilde’s statement “Most people are other people”, the project Re-move does not keep a welcoming stance on a matchless identity, but deconstructs and hybridizes the concept of the ‘pure’ culture. The comfort women to Japanese soldiers, Choi’s Japanese grandmother who married a Korean laborer dispatched to Japan just before Korea’s liberation from Japan and moved back to Korea, and the grandmothers of ‘Yangji-ri’ who migrated to the DMZ town — whom we encounter precisely where Chansook Choi returns — keep their distance from a form that appeals to the power of the dominant identity, while also rejecting the collective identity as ‘victims’. In explaining ‘le Tour’ in relation to the universality of the ‘blackness’ of the black slaves of the Carribbeans, Edourd Glissant said the following about the idea of ‘awakening themselves of their differences in a different place, and thus leaving returning again’:

“We must return there. There is no detour without retour (return). It’s not about a return to the unchanging identity of a being towards original dream, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish.”

While removing the illusory unity of identity, or fate, Choi’s Re-move also demonstrates the world’s conflicts and brutality perpetuated by the illusion of identity or fate, not through epistemological means but through artistic research. By focusing on women who have lost their grounds or have been removed in HIS-story, it attempts to show how other identities and values pertaining to human kind, such as class, gender, occupation, language, politics and ethics, are being disregarded. The project ultimately asks the question whether there is any validity in the assumption that identity can be uniquely categorized by religion, culture and nationality.

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