Lot 894: CHOI SO YOUNG

CHOI SO YOUNG
(Born in 1980)
Early Dawn
denim
130 x 160 cm. (51 1/4 x 63 in.)
Executed in 2007

From a narrative point of view, the viewer is placed with a high vantage point of a revitalizing scene that appeals in warm familiarity, a place where Choi So Young's fondness is felt as the audience comes to realize her assertion of exploring autobiographical connotations by her constant reminiscence of her hometown. Choi's ingenious awareness of medium and subject matter is what sustains her brilliance in enticing new perceptions into appreciating her oeuvres even with her dogged specificity in locality and of the same medium.

Her tuneful control of the composition and surprisingly eloquent coloring of the yellow sky unwinds the rigid characteristic of denim to a softer, expressive and metaphoric layer in both Early Dawn (Lot 894) and Seascape of Busan.(Lot 895) Choi's work may often be overlooked as one that relies heavily on aesthetic experimentation, however her tasteful awareness in psychological perceptual contentment proves otherwise as she shrewdly toys with compositional manipulation by conducting an arbitrary yet logical placement of the yellow fabric of ambiguous visual identification on the lower part of the oeuvre to balance the sinuous golden sky in Early Dawn. In sync with the confined structure of the building walls on the two edges of the oeuvre, Choi skillfully locks the border of the picture from expanding to a larger vista, distinctively cornering the audience's vision into a narrowed distance of the town.

On the contrary, in Seascape of Busan, Choi refreshingly opens up the pictorial planar by allowing the nature of the yellow dyed sky to float away from the busy milieu of the right edge of the picture towards the infinite landscape of the emptiness of the left edge of the picture. Choi wittingly left half of her oeuvre bare to liberate a confined landscape, moreover perhaps to return to the initial essence of landscape as something everlasting which cannot be captured with a structural confinement.

Choi also manages to speak successfully, moreover coyly of her cultural and social concerns in anthropological reductivity reflecting her conscious technical decision in adopting a simplified yet nostalgic aesthetic arrangement in landscape which seemingly appear homogeneous but in fact holds profound connotations of complex veracity of modernism. Thriving to alleviate the nausea of modernization and the solitude of isolation, Choi expresses her token of support to society by benignly sharing the charm of humble yet stunning panorama of Busan.