Jeongmoon Choi’s Ultra Violet Installations

Jeongmoon Choi’s profound interest in conceptual thinking, media and material led her to see a creative potential in space and architecture, where the built environment could be bound to the practice of drawing. In this, Choi was influenced by Minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback, a forerunner and major influence on many installation artists today. Sandback’s work features lengths of yarn, and his sculptures are visionary and imaginative, minimal and literal. He refers to his sculptures as operating in a pedestrian space, acknowledging the viewer’s movement through the space as something that has to be engaged with actively. Similarly, Choi uses a woven matrix of material stretched across the floors and walls of exhibition spaces to create a visual play on color, form and perspective.

Choi draws her vision directly into a room by using endless amounts of fine thread, tracing three-dimensional lines in space to create illusions of perspective. As she directly transforms the conditions of an existing space, the artist provokes questions about personal perspective. Analogous to negotiating lines on a canvas, Choi negotiates space using her own materials. The three-dimensional drawings then become projections of the artist’s imaginary constructions. They begin with a line of thread and progress through space in various abstract and geometric amalgamations, defining planes and volumes with no mass.

Choi has developed her physical practice from both her background as a painter and her upbringing in Seoul, South Korea, where space has to be engineered in innovative and imaginative ways. Her works not only map out disorientating visual experiences but also create unique social situations. Emphasizing the concept of delineation and the restructuring of space and its movement over time, her works resonate on a much deeper level, beneath the interplay of surface and line. Choi references the tangible movement and frequency of seismic waves as elements of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, natural disasters around the globe and in the East.

KARST Gallery in Plymouth commissioned Choi to transform their gallery’s environment. In Explorer, which lasted until 20 October 2013, the artist created an installation specific to the expanse of the gallery space. Choi allowed visitors to roam around the darkened, industrial space illuminated by a matrix of various patterns of thread in visceral colors and manifold shapes. As interaction is integral to Choi’s work, the installations require the UV light to be exposed, while the participants activate the works through interacting with, being engaged by and mediating on the visual playgrounds she creates.

From November 2013 through February 2014, Jeongmoon Choi’s exhibition PULS was exhibited at Moeller Fine Art Berlin. The bespoke installation was composed of white threads woven through the outer floor and walls of the gallery space, visible to the eye only via ultraviolet light. Alongside the exhibition, PULS also featured a number of Choi’s two-dimensional works on paper.