Cody Choi

Flora #2

2015

Cody Choi born in 1961 in Seoul, where he lives and works, has been an artist and cultural theorist since the 1980s and since he flew, in his early twenties, from Korea to the USA, where he arrived in Los Angeles as an immigrant. He studied at CalArts with Mike Kelley and he was good friends with John Baldessari. As an artist in the US, he has been exploring the cultural identity and relationships of authority in contemporary society. His paintings, sculptures and installation works have focused on the clashes between the diverse cultures of our contemporary age as well as hybrid cultures and the endless newly-created social phenomena as a result. Having started his career in the United States, Choi experienced chaos and frustration in the conflicting ideas of the rational and emotional, visual and conceptual art, commercial galleries and artworks and the American and Korean culture. Based on his frustration, Choi‘s work has focused on the subject of finding the alien Asian identity in American society. While such confusion and anxiety were a burden of suffering for the artist, he began to recognize them as beautiful experiences, which allowed him to discover broader and deeper meanings and to nurture his thoughts. Choi represented Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2017. His retrospective Cody Choi. Culture Cuts was first shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Musée d‘Art Moderne de Marseille, traveled major art museums and institutions throughout Europe, such as the University of Malaga, Spain and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany, in Summer 2017. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions such as The Thinker at Deitch Projects in New York, L‘ART AU CORPS: le corps exposé de Man Ray à nos jours at Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, Busan Biennale, A tribute to Mike Kelley at MOCA Los Angeles, Gwangju Biennale, Arko Art Center in Seoul, or Today Art Museum, Beijing.