Since the 1990s, Choi Gene Uk’s work has oscillated in a non-homogeneous, pendulum-like movement between “objective realism” and “realism of sensation,” and further between realism and modernism. The title of this exhibition, 《The 880,000-Won Generation – Memento Mori》, clearly articulates the artist’s determination to confront and cut through this inherent contradiction head-on.
 
The artist’s intervention into a reality in which even an individual’s social death is met with cynicism may be understood as an attempt to semantically expand and reconstruct fragmented realities. However, by tracing the “logic of meaning” through the “logic of sensation,” or by repeatedly brushing against the grain of “objective meaning” with “subjective sensation,” Choi introduces ontological fissures into the painstakingly reconstructed field of social meaning.
 
This may be seen as a painterly strategy intended to invigorate the pictorial surface through a recurring movement of coexistence, in which objective reality and subjective feeling do not capture or subsume one another. Yet the artist does not remain at this equilibrium; instead, he deliberately exposes himself to the tension between “objective realism” and “realism of sensation.” By grasping this tension through rapid brushwork, he embodies a painterly narrative charged with social meaning as a “dialectical flash in a state of suspension.”

In doing so, Choi pushes painting beyond its illusory limitations and compels it to function as an “ontological event.” Through this gesture, he invites viewers to participate in an ontological inquiry into painting itself.

References

• 《88만원 세대 - Memento mori (880-Thousand-Won Generation-Memento Mori)》