JEONGMOON CHOI
CLIMATONIC : Floating landscape
DURATION
JAN 21 to APRIL 15, 2022
It was her own earthquake experience, in Athens in 2013, that led Jeongmoon Choi to engage artistically with the doctrine of the construction of the earth's crust, tectonics.
Choi has also devoted herself to this theme for her exhibition at KANG Contemporary. The artist has not only developed a new installation, but has also created a new term: The portmanteau word "Climatonic," which Choi composed from the English-language terms for "climate" and "tectonics," names the largely still unnoticed phenomenon of the influence of plate tectonic processes on the climate, through continental drift.
Choi's exhibition "Climatonic: Floating Landscape" makes these earth and climate movements visually and physically tangible, so that one can trace them with one's own body: the light installation "Floating Landscape," which consists of many colored, elastic threads and traverses the room, imagines and symbolizes the shifts of the earth's plates in a wave-like manner, similar to a vector graphic. The work is based on scientific records of seismic movements near Japan - the group of islands neighboring Korea, where three earth plates cross.
-
By using UV rays as the source of the light that makes the accurately stretched threads visually stand out even in the dark, Choi, who originally comes from a painting background, treads the borderline between spatial drawing and light art. What emerges are sensual effects between two-dimensional recording and its three-dimensional interpretation.
In addition to "Floating Landscape", which also radiates out into the urban space through the gallery's window front and, especially at dusk and in darkness, also develops its own effect from the outside, Jeongmoon Choi shows a number of works in the upper area of KANG Contemporary, some of which seem two-dimensional at first glance: Here, for example, we are dealing with tectonic impacts drawn as notations or wall objects in which strictly vertically arranged threads in the form of obviously overloaded barcodes tell of the (in)legibility of human memories of natural disasters.
Text Martin Conrads
Exhibition View, CLIMATONIC : Floating Landscape, Jeongmoon Choi, courtesy Kang Contemporary, photo: Sarah Khosrawi
CV
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jeongmoon Choi originally studied painting. The artist lights up the darkness with a complex, geometric mesh of UV-reflective threads that create a certain sense of confusion – as the threads reflect the light, the space seems to vibrate. Jeongmoon Choi studied at Sungshin University in Seoul and moved in 1995 to Germany where she studied at the Kassel College of Fine Arts.
She lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.
