Choi Sujin, Hauling Up the Red 2021, Oil on canvas, 181.8x181.8cm © Choi Sujin

Choi Sujin’s solo exhibition 《Fruity Buttercream》 will be held from November 5 to November 27, 2021, on the second floor of the main building and the first floor of the annex at AIT in Samseong-dong.

Choi’s paintings, which evoke a fragrant yet somehow mischievous scent, colors settling vividly as if by magic on volumes swollen like foam, and the impulse to poke them with a “pook,” seem quite literally like generous swirls of colorful “fruit-scented buttercream.”

Rather than attaching a grand language of contemplation to this series of new works, presented after a long interval, the artist chose to call this new chapter by words that are playful yet reveal an utterly honest sense of perception.

《Fruity Buttercream》 is Choi Sujin’s first solo exhibition in about four years, presenting a synesthetic installation that brings together new flat paintings, yarn drawings, and sound specially produced for the exhibition(composition: Lee Neung Ryong). At first glance, the artist’s picture planes seem to gather only scenes from sweet dreams, but in fact they express a world meticulously built up through delicate rules and her own stories.

As if creating through her paintings another secret space that actually exists, the artist carefully prepares in advance, within the paintings, the materials for that world. This may explain the artist’s half-complaining remark that she ends up painting “a watermelon at the size of a watermelon and a person at the height of a person.” As much as the objects and figures maintain a scale not distant from reality, the size of the artist’s imagination and heart toward the world she paints are in contact with each other.

When we encounter calm sentences that miss none of the small things felt from beginning to end, yet never exaggerate their own emotions, we feel that the writing is truly good.

Like such a poem or novel, or like someone’s letter that has moved your heart, Choi Sujin’s work possesses a strange charm that makes us want to persuade ourselves, even without clear-cut logic or ornate description, even as we fill in the blank spaces of the story on our own. This is precisely the point that explains why her work attracted attention early on and why so many people have waited for the artist’s new works.


Great Masters

Now, the artist has become more skillful at handling these pictorial elements. Perhaps this is thanks to the help of the *F-CREW, who had been invisibly moving behind the artist all along. Of course, they still exist only in the artist’s imagination. They have no interest in dots, lines, or planes that have simply dropped onto a white canvas.

They fear no color. Like skilled workers silently carrying out their assigned responsibilities every day, they haul up blue, yellow, and *red, and weave color and form with skill and not a trace of doubt. If there were a superhero story in the world of painting, it would be written about them. These great masters, who freely combine color and mass, surface composition and pictorial proportion, have just successfully completed a vast project and are now lingering for a moment in a deep canyon known only to the artist and themselves.

Among the many media of art, painting is something that ends only after passing through a time that is entirely one’s own. The artist also cultivates her work through her own time, but at the same time she may dream of beings to whom she can comfortably confide her worries about this unknowable process and on whom she can suitably lean. Such beings are not needed only inside paintings.

Even if one cannot express it outwardly because it seems terribly narcissistic, anyone might at least once dream of beings who embrace oneself and everything around oneself. Choi Sujin speaks of these pure imaginings that everyone thinks of but cannot bring out, in her own language, boldly, with a pleasant lightness, and more sensuously than anyone. This is the unique power of the artist mentioned earlier.


Falling Letters

In this exhibition, the artist seems to have decided to trust a little more in the power of her own visual language. Letters that seem to have fallen with a patter from somewhere, and numerous words beginning with F, are written out by the artist in her own way. Words beginning with F still do not narrow the distance between reality and the canvas, but rather this becomes a clear reason for the artist to chew them over again as her own. These words, once only solid, pass through the artist’s dimension and become a *crossword with soft, lumpy blanks.

Combined with the sound actually resonating throughout the first-floor exhibition space of the annex, this creates a new rhythm between word and word. The sound in the exhibition space seems like a combination of sounds that might arise if one were to step, one foot at a time, across these stepping-stone-like words.

The letters left as blanks, yet connected to one another as a single mass, may perhaps be the form of language that is most ideal to the artist. Part of this sentence is shown together with yarn drawings that seem to have been made materially and immediately, like a spider lazily suspended in midair endlessly spinning thread. The artist’s yarn drawings, which she says she simply knitted as her hands moved, closely resemble the paintings she creates with paint.

In this way, Choi Sujin continues to contain the exciting world she imagines, sensing the touch of yarn piled in one corner of an attic and the colorful textures inside tubes of paint. And we only need to bury our faces deep into the surface of these paintings like fruit buttercream, and stay as completely immersed in this world as possible.

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