Choi Jeong Hwa
DAEGU ART MUSEUM
374 Samdeok-dong, Suseong-gu
February 26–June 23
Choi Jeong Hwa, Kabbala, 2013, plastic baskets, steel frame. Installation view.
Since his debut in the early 1990s, Choi Jeong Hwa has been a central figure in Korean contemporary art. Yet, “Kabbala” is his first exhibition in a museum. This curatorial omission is somewhat understandable; Choi has never been considered an artist per se. Rather, he’s more often seen engaged in the work of an interior designer, architect, industrial designer, art director, stage designer, and entrepreneur. At one point, Choi self-deprecatingly took on the moniker “AAA,” or “Always Almost Artist,” which today, after this sprawling exhibition, sounds almost as accurate.
Kabbala, 2013, the exhibition’s title piece, is a thirty-three-foot-wide and sixty-foot-high cylindrical installation comprised of 5,400 green and red baskets in fourteen variable sizes. These custom-made baskets were arduously knotted together over seven days of intense labor by the artist and eight installation experts. Gazing at the gigantic structure, which is suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s central hall, one begins to sense the meaning of the title: Surely some mystical transformation has taken place to turn plastic, one of the cheapest industrial materials, into a sublime work of art.
When Choi first used plastic in his artwork in 1991, the artificial, superficial, cost-effective, mass-produced, and rapidly consumable material perfectly represented the vulgar reality of Korean society, which was exclusively geared toward rapid economic growth. Now, for this exhibition, Choi includes it among other practices from his multidisciplinary background; he redesigned the museum’s lobby, made sofa sets for the lounges, created a children’s play-zone, and installed his own kitsch objects. Thus, the show actually points to a more fundamental transformation, one that Choi has taken part in, at a time when nonartistic activities are deemed art.