Robert C. Morgan 2015년
While houses are often regarded as functionary places where people eat, sleep, and interact with one another, for many Koreans, houses are something more than just a domicile or fact of circumstance. The house represents a sensitivity of feeling with a lingering symbolic resonance deeply held within human consciousness, even as one may travel to another place. The house is a symbolic nexus of peace and quietude that reverberates within our sense of well-being. The house is, in fact, our home. It is the central location that begets feelings of brightness and intimacy. For this reason, houses in Korea, over centuries of time, hold a special significance. They are physical structures that carry a legacy of family histories. They include the process of living from day to day with parents, grandparents, and siblings, from generation to generation, over the course of years. The house in Korea is associated with warmth, security, happiness, grief, sorrow, pleasure, growth, withdrawal, evolution, realization, ecstasy, and much more. It is the place in the heart, a place that the mind will never forget.
Soonmin Choi’s ongoing series (since 2005) of modestly scaled paintings and mixed medium works, titled My Father’s House, are about these kinds of memories. They express moments of sincere authenticity, in the purest sense. The bright colors and shapes held within Ms. Choi’s miniature houses suggest moments given over to heightened feelings of quiet celebration and ebullient fulfillment. Her paintings are fundamental statements of faith as to what it means to be alive, healthy, and thriving in the wanderlust of nature. They are visual statements that hold magical memories of her deepest feelings and, in this sense, they are ultimately works of art. They communicate the intimacy of human beings living together and the positive feelings toward one another. Even as the artist comments on the hardships and difficulties endured by her beloved Father as she was growing up and coming of age as an adult, Soonmin Choi’s paintings point in the direction of the ideal.
The significant of these paintings goes beyond the obvious. They are neither avant-garde nor classical in their delivery. They are poetic works of art that transmit the truth of the artist’s presence. As one studies these forms, they offer a reminder of the subtle delivery of human experience through signs and symbols. They express an open-minded belief in the optimism of the human spirit. Soonmin Choi’s miniature houses are more than houses. They are signs of inexorable delight that tell us a tale about occupying planet Earth and importance of fulfilling nature’s purpose.
Ms. Choi’s sensibility is a compassionate one. Her paintings fulfill one of the major paradoxes of art – that to feel compassion for others is find the passion to do one’s work. Through this energy, Ms. Choi has discovered a special way of working. She begins with a hard wood surface on which she layers sheets of hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper), one over another. Often she will mix sand or grit from crushed rocks into her pigments and inks. Occasionally she will etch or scratch lines into the surface, which will become the ground on which her house reside. In the act of painting, Choi focuses on a very particular vocabulary of essential or “primary shapes.” The house is a child-like pentagon: the first symbol of a house, always with a peaked roof. Within these primary pentagon shapes, the artist will paint very thin multi-colored lines or bead-like swirls, applying one dot or dash at a time until the swirling sensation is visually complete. Sometimes the dots are infinitesimal Impressionist ones, barely visible, similar to the manner paintings used by the great French colorist, Pierre Bonnard.
Other times the ground is dazzling in its multifarious density, its fine quality of richness, reminiscent of the soil necessary to gestate vegetable roots, ginger, and grapes. In these built-up fields, filled with a spacious, yet illusory depth, Soonmin Choi encounters a coy resemblance to the work of Jean Dubuffet’s Readings of the Soil (1957). In each case, the tenacity of the ground reveals an expressive quality that holds defiance with nature, a statement of eternal presence that the soil offers in relation to sky and water, fire and air. These are the elements of the environment that surround the preeminent house and the neighborhoods culled from the imagination.
There are circles and rings often seen in My Father’s House. Often Choi’s fastidiously designed houses with stand independently and other time in groups or with a smaller house turned sideways. On some occasions, one will confront angular planes in primary colors – a wedge of blue or yellow or red – encroaching from the side of the painting or emanating from one of the corners. A small chirping bird occasionally appears either outside or within the house. The bird carries an important presence of ongoing life and hope, the tactile and ethereal substance of joy. It offers a transensory sign that moves from vision to sound, the gentle sound of a beautiful spring day, which is, in fact, the metaphor that transmits throughout My Father’s House.
Scholar, poet, artist, curator, and critic, Robert C. Morgan writes frequently on the art of contemporary Chinese and Korean artists. He is the New York Editor of Asian Art News and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2005, Dr. Morgan was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Republic of Korea.