Cody Choi became known in the 1990s when he was working in New York City and attracted considerable attention with the exhibition The Thinker staged at Deitch Projects, NY. Inspired by Rodin’s Le Penseur, the exhibition featured seated figures, formed out of pink Pepto-Bismol® and lavatory paper, sitting on toilets and reflecting on the meaning of the world; the figures were placed on top of empty transport crates in which the artist’s posterior had taken a seat, digesting and excreting the cultural input. Choi had been born in South Korea in 1961. Following the death of his father, the family had emigrated to California in 1982. Under the military dictatorship in Korea his father’s company was nationalized and the early deaths of both his sisters traumatized his mother and himself. In Los Angeles in addition, he found himself exposed to racial discrimination.

In 1985, Choi took up the study of art in Los Angeles alongside John Baldessari and under his mentor Mike Kelley, who aroused his interest in post-colonial theories and cultural differences. The two men have a shared concern for the theme of collective fears and desires, which can mostly be traced back to religious, social or sexual conditioning. In Choi, the deeply disturbing experiences of separation and uprooting led to a psychological crisis. He created his first body-related sculptures and conceptual works, his focus being on the search for identity in a foreign culture. Kelley wrote a first brief text about Choi, who in the mid-1990s relocated to New York. In multiple references to Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, Marcel Duchamp or Gerhard Richter, Choi began to take over western works of art and their ready-formulated attitudes, re-defining them in the sense of Appropriation Art. His works negotiated both philosophical and aesthetic themes and clichés, showing a repeated concern for body-related, sculptural energy-storage and metabolism. Choi addressed the theme of the conditio humana, of being human in an alien, superficial culture by setting the existentially experienced Easternness of his origins in relation to the fantastic elements of the American dream. In 1995 the artist stated that “Despite innumerable cultural exchanges we only know one another but do not understand one another. It is as if we eat foods but do not digest them.”

Since the year 2003, Choi has again been living in his country of origin, which has undergone major change. Whilst his student years in America had been characterized by the viewpoint of an Asian immigrant, who came laden with clichés derived from the cinema and television and experienced a cultural entry shock, now he is viewed as the foreigner, the American. In 2015, the exhibition Culture Cuts in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf gave him his first large-scale overview exhibition (which went on to further locations in Marseille, Madrid and Chemnitz). Choi’s strongly autobiographical creative work marked by appropriation reveals manifold cultural differences between East and West which he has experienced in the course of his life. In 2017, he and Lee Wan designed the Korean Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale: a stirring, angry, apocalyptic contribution on the art business, which he describes as casino-capitalism – alongside the equally sombre German gloom of Anne Imhof’s “Faust”.

Under the title Mr. Hard Mix Master - Noblesse Hybridige Series 3 Meyer Riegger now exhibits paintings that provide a further example of Choi’s aesthetic and cultural hybridizations. The works are traditional forms of a specific typology of Korean painting – known as Sagunja – presented against a background containing motifs derived from Rococo-style European paintings. The perfect hybrid contains elements of at least two progenitors, who give the new subject its identity (DNA). Hybridization is hence a way of transferring identity and simultaneously changing it. Choi’s hybrids function as critical factors for cultural phenomena that are experienced on the level of entire populations or as part of a major global debate on cultural production and its values.

The Rococo period finds expression in interior design, i.e. in decoration and furniture. In painting, it is marked by compositions that feature lush vegetation and portrayals of country life together with many flirtatiously gallant scenes and a certain measure of eroticism. The vegetation is a motif that is executed in garden and woodland settings and in subdued colours with soft, dulcet tones. The end of Rococo coincides with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789.
The hallmarks of Sagunja painting are the values expressed by this particular form of art, which is also known as the “four gracious plants” or the “four gentlemen”. In Korean, Gunja is synonymous with the virtuous man who, in line with Confucian belief, paints beauty as part of his meditation. In the Confucian mentality, which has deep roots in the Joseon (or Chosŏn) dynasty (1392-1650) virtue is achieved by study, the practice of literature, and the adherence to a detailed code of obedience that structures the populace in social and political terms. In a more liberal version, the tradition of Sagunja painting would represent the four seasons, i.e. the passage of time, employing four flowers characteristic of such painting. This pictorial tradition began in China as early as the 10th Century and spread across all of Eastern Asia.

Cody Choi’s series follows a production process that combines digital technologies, printing techniques, oil painting (as a Western technique) and traditional methods that were utilized in Sagunja painting. The artist looks online for pictures and images representative of the Rococo aesthetic, which, once transformed by means of image-editing programmes into backgrounds for his paintings, are then printed on imitation marble and executed in oils. Over these layers of materials and styles Choi paints flowers, using traditional bamboo brushes such as are used for Asian lacquers. The result varies in accordance with the stylistic articulation of the relationship between figure and ground: in some works, the flower motifs are in the background and the figures in the foreground can be clearly perceived. In other works, the background tends to be blurred, with the effect that the typical “four plant” figures emerge against an explosion landscape. What is being sought after here is an abstract composition which demands that we the beholders should grasp its complex syntax involving manifold, fluctuating meanings.

Choi’s oeuvre is closely linked to his biography. As has been remarked, he “emphasizes in his art the shift in values of a society of which he is a part but to which he does not feel that he belongs, whose values he helps to produce and at the same time rejects, whose mirror he both constructs and also smashes to smithereens”. After years of conceptional and critical exploration of the artistic medium, the transformation of techniques and materials, and taking flight from foreseeable styles or recognizable languages, the artist confronts his age and his history. Rococo and Sagunja are metaphors which serve to explain the complexity of the present beyond any aesthetic or functional conditions. History does not produce art, but without knowledge of history there is no development and no innovation and we are condemned to the eternal repetition of the same.

In his floor work “Queen Mother of the West: Olympia”, Cody Choi alludes to the mother goddess in Chinese religion and mythology, who is revered also in neighbouring Asian countries and has been attested since ancient times. Her very name betrays some of her most important qualities: she is royal, female and associated with the West. Dating back to oracle bone inscriptions from the 15th Century BCE which record sacrifices to a “female mother”, she is often associated with Taoism. The belief that she grants prosperity, longevity and eternal happiness emerged with the opening of the Silk Road during the Han Dynasty in the 2nd Century BCE.
The stuffed animals stand as sad creatures in contradiction of this mythical and mystical hope of global amelioration. Their dressing up and trivialized wildness with Nike attributes on a rolling wooden box constitute a bitter commentary on society. Choi himself states: “The fake NIKE® shoes were the gateway to the West. In the 1970s there were no NIKE® shoes in Korea, but we heard a good number of mythical stories about them. In the Korea of those days, NIKE® was the symbol for wealth. Thus many children painted the NIKE® symbol on their shoes and wore them. For a long time this was for me a kind of battle.”

In Choi’s exhibition Mr. Hard Mix Master - Noblesse Hybridige Series 3 at Meyer Riegger Berlin, the Olympia and the current, recent paintings form the framework for another piece in a completely different medium – immaterial, so to speak. Two floodlights, which Choi has carefully calibrated, mirror perfectly the condition of cultural hybridity with a further globally understood signifier added. The spotlight – also known as a ‘followspot’ – directs complete attention to something, to a person who, however, possibly has no wish to be in the spotlight at all: he or she is over-exposed.

Cody Choi puts his finger on the sore and sensitive areas of cultural differences, showing in a conceptual and sensitive way human lives lived between attribution and prejudice. Whether he deconstructs classics of art history and offers new readings of them, or examines his own identity as a problem of socialization and media manipulation, up to and including philosophical borrowings and the more profound search for sense in a capitalistically superficial world (on each occasion portraying a personally experienced difference), he always points out – beyond the physical, and even more psychological caesura, gulf or conflict between the cultures – what it is that our world suffers from. In our attempts to evaluate these works we face an insurmountable task, since our knowledge of Asian culture is restricted largely to the culinary or to literature in translation. Cody Choi, the Transformer of Worlds, takes us with him – marvelling and at a loss for words – on the journey that is his own.

Text: Gregor Jansen
Translation: Richard Humphrey