Chan Sook Choi graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Chugye University for the Arts. She pursued Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Art and Media and Vordiplom/Diplom in Visual Communication at the University der Künste in Berlin, where she also completed the Meisterschüler program. She is currently active in both Korea and Germany.
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.
