KUKJE GALLERY While there's nothing recently made known in talk of art m the computer age.KUKJE GALLERY While there's nothing recently made known in talk of art m the computer age, or of the influence of digital imagery forward visual perception and the artistic imagination, Cody Choi's exhibition "New Pictorialism--Database Painting" merits attention because of the artist's impressive way of personalizing these themes. The exhibition consists of three parts: twenty-one "paintings" (actually vutek prints upon mesh, backed with canvas); a desktop computer with an interactive software program; and a verse stenciled along the gallery walls, narrating the story line behind the paintings, the personal experience from which the throw derives. Choi's previous work has been consistently intelligent-meditations forward art history layered with his personal experience as a sociology observer in Korea, then as an art close examiner in California encountering Western art, and finally as a Korean artist continuing to live and work in the United States. In his 1996 display in Seoul he used Pepto Bismol mixed with toilet paper as a sculptural material to originate full-size versions of several icons from Western cut including Rodin's Thinker. The antacid had become a favorite material of the artist's after pair and a half years of consumprion-- a bottle each day, to relieve the constant abdominal distress caused on the anxiety of expatriate life. The majority of "New Pictorialism" consists of conventionally formatted canvases, if it be not that printed with high-resolution images of animals in close junglelike settings, which Choi made using the coloring program in succession his son's computer and then revised using more sophisticated regularitys With their dazzling video-arcade palette, the lush backgrounds imply a spatial setting of about depth, but the order of things in the paintings does not mimic the natural order that we inhabit, as did conventional mechanical reproductions of the like kind as film, photography, or video. Rather the paintings are the issue of what the artist calls a "new pictorialism": Originating in clip art selected from database files, it is imagery that has been rest edited, and synthesized. The paintings are material evidence of the story line neared in the wall text, which rehearses an experience involving the artist and his son Choi recalls by what mode as a child in kindergarten, he was taught to use a pencil for writing and drawing. His son at the same age, learned for what cause to use a computer: After he came back abiding-place [from a day at the zoo] he told me he wanted to draw a tiger. Then he went to his computer desk to find a tiger figure from his magic 3-D pre-schooler printing software. He made a surpassingly successful tiger painting and printed it revealed I was surprised at computer It is a thinking tool, gives my son pre-given database and hyper electronic digital imagination. It became a fresh idea of imagination, instead of my son's imagination on the outside of what he saw." The narrative is dearly and simply stated, thought-provoking, and nuanced with a Korean accent. The subject conveys the artist's particular manner of speaking English: Choi communicates well after many years in the United States, however English is not his native language. His expansive meditations upon such grand themes as novel models of creative processes and the frontiers of globalizing technology and of the artistic imagination are contained by means of his idiosyncratic manner of dialect Language remains the most difficult barrier to overturn binding the individual to a place of origin and distancing him from the place to which he's migrated. COPYRIGHT 2000 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. |
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