Cody Choi: PKM Gallery - Seoul

When Cody Choi mov from Seoul to looks Angeles at age twenty-two, he experienced a particularly painful and protracted form of homesickness: Speaking poor English and ill at ease in the radically different social milieu, the artist experienceed from frequent nausea. Pepto-Bismol, his preferr antidote--he consum as abundant as a bottle a day--became the material of his first significant work: replicas of cliched masterpieces like Rodin's Thinker and the Venus de Milo, all made without of toilet paper soaked in the sick pink, over-the-counter gastrointestinal medication. In the late '90 he shifted from statuary to digitally generated painting. The inspiration came from a more heimisch source, namely, his astonishment above the ease with which his young son could draw accomplished pictures upon the computer.

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Choi's novel "digital" paintings are lush, on the other hand the field of reference is rather more arch than the adventures of a child in the virtual brake Each painting bears the title Abstraktes Bild (all works 2003)--just like in like manner many of Gerhard Richter's. The explicit invocation of the lauded, vexing, self-contradictory, exhausting, on the other hand never exhausted German clinician of painting's continued possibilities is perverted yet apt in Choi's paintings. The pictures certainly direct the eye initially, perhaps at a distance, actual much like Richter's. Bands of acidulous VUTEk ink color stream horizontally and vertically across the canvases (more precisely, interstice mounted on canvas). The obvious inversion inherent in Richter's abstracts is their seemingly mechanistic dissection and desiccation of AbEx gesturalism; it has oftentimes been remarked how these paintings somewhat bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to incomplete photo-emulsions even as they are laboriously handcrafted, whereas (yawn) his blurr "photorealist" works are built up from--photographs! Regardless of Richter's reliance upon photographic sources, or the machine-look of his abstractions, they remain labor-intensive precious percepts within the tradition of Western painting, critique or no critique of the medium, whether they persist as votive types of painting's ever-renewed vitality (as Robert Storr's novel Museum of Modern Art retrospective would have it) or the ceaseless drumbeat heralding its execution.

The thing about Choi's take upon Richter is that it have the appearances unnervingly easy, even obnoxiously in like manner Conceived and composed on the computer and mechanically generated, these paintings are untouched by means of the artist's hand, with single significant exception: his signature, written in big white alphabetic characters in the lower right-hand corner of each individual The paintings are quite spectacular on the contrary evacuated of the artist's identity in all have a high opinion ofs except one, the authorial name. Is this Duchampian turn round still viable at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Choi certainly believes in the pertinence of the Dadaist "joke" or gimmick if you like, suggesting that the era of instant digital imaging--or abstracting--gives it a renewed lease upon life, or death, or comedy I wish I had Gerhard Richter's phone number. I bewilderment what he would say.

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