[평론 2016.06] Creative Practice of Daily Life - Choi sung-seok's Urban Archiving -

Creative Practice of Daily Life

- Choi sung-seok's Urban Archiving -

 

 

Jung Sanghee (Art Critic)

The scenery as an object of experience could be understood as a simple group of things, geographical features, roads, houses, plants, etc. The scenery formed with physical circumstance is usually grasped with the subjective, cultural view and intension of observers. The value of the scenery, therefore, may begin with specific union of meanings created by the observers. Choi sung-seok takes an interest to marginal and trivial parts in archiving the urban scenery. For a everyday’s journey he is looking for an undistinguished and secluded scenery and saving it to his view and photographs.

 

These are only ordinary scenes without specials in the canvases like images of the inside of the subway with passengers, the library packed with people, and motorcycles resting against roads. It is not easy to give special meaning to the common images of the scenery of raining night, red parking cones and chairs standing in a row. There are more images of the ordinary life like people walking through the park full of trees and sitting at a outdoor cafe.

Choi‘s works of art are the results of creative practice of daily life. The object of pictorial images is from trivial details of daily moments. The works are connected with the theory of Michael de Certeau in terms of possibility of the creative practice of everyday life. Our urban environment has been geometrically constructed in accordance with some urban plans and policies for long time. The gap between parts of drawing attention and being isolated in our urban setting becomes more pronounced as the environment becomes more developed. Choi sung seok thinks the urban conditions flexible up to people walking and experiencing them is more important than the fixed value of specific urban landmarks. In accordance to the experience of specific places, Choi shows the visually reconstructed urban surroundings. The first step of his works is just walking. The walking is regarded as talking, and then the talking is created with kind of new spaces visually. The spatial practice is being possible through the activities like walking, sitting, watching, etc. He constantly records the process of activities.

In the process of configuration of urban space, the way of taking pictures is just as important as the walking in terms of recording. Choi follows up the picturesque scene in a subjective point of view for the necessary relations with preference and aesthetical object. His own beautiful images, however, is mainly founded from marginalized parts. If he chooses the parts once, they finally get the value and aesthetic materiality. For the process, the creative practice is being formed with the discovery of beauty in our daily life. The urban space is expressed with archiving, reclassification, relocation, and reunion to be newly visual results. One place may be changed to different, even contradictory one, and the place may involve unpredictable space and the space makes the place modified and ambiguous.

His creative viewpoint on the perspective with his own way is partly playing a role in the process of taking experience and recording urban scenery. Choi has tried to break the traditional perspective which has been used to make flat surface to three-dimensional one. As the spot of his viewpoint, the perspective could be totally overturned. It is related to his way to consider trivial parts more important. One picture has sometimes not one fixed focus, but two more or moving and even overturned focus in his arts. However, it provides more active experience about static urban scenery to spectators. The way is expanding with trials to use time difference to the one canvas.

New spaces founded with daily experience in urban area are from the artist’s subjective experiences. And then they physically attract attention to be visually recreated as results of practice. His own world of art is shaping with understanding and interpreting trivial parts in urban scenery to more important and valuable ones. ■