Cody Choi Art

Cody Choi (*1961 in Seoul, where he lives and works) is a connaisseur of Chinese Taoism. He has studied a lot of the most important taoist texts and educated himself and gained a knowledge as a specialist in this field. Thus, he can allow himself to distill from Taoism sentences, one-liners that somewhat summarize the meaning of a whole text. For a group of neon-works (each a unique piece, not an edition) he then translated these Chinese one-liners to English and then he transferred these English one-liners to Korean signs. He did so in a way that when these signs are read by a Korean or someone who is able to read Korean signs, the English line „difference is beautiful“ is pronounced phonetically. This method seems to be a common procedure in Seoul. For instance, as Choi had told me, you have a menu in the restaurant that says (all in Korean signs) in Chinese „delicious“, in Korean „large“ and in English „steak“. For Choi this combination of cultures and languages reflects his life as a fugitive and immigrant to the USA and to California as well as the situation in that we live. The sentence "Difference is Beautiful" is highlighting the beauty of the different possibilities of life and culture. It is arguing for the difference and its pro-active acceptance. Technically, the work can be installed in its plexiglass box at the wall or directly at the wall. The cables that are now hanging down from the box can be hidden in the wall so that one would not see them. Content-wise, this work needs to be understood also against the background of Cody Choi's life: he 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 ("no more boring art"). 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 we can experience inthe work "Difference is Beautiful", in which three different languages and cultures are involved), 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 art works, 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 the American society. While such confusion and anxiety was 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 Biennial in 2017. His retrospective „Cody Choi. Culture Cuts“ – first shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (s) and the Musée d‘Art Moderne de Marseille (s) – was traveling 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 (s), „L‘ART AU CORPS: le corps exposé de Man...