14 Jan 2010 — 13 Feb 2010

 Kiseog Choi's page
Kiseog Choi
UNTITLED

Gallery 2 presents Choi Ki-Seog’s solo show as its first exhibition of 2010. Choi is a sculptor (and professor at Kyonggi University) famous for his iron-welded sculpture, through which he has explored the materiality of iron and the relationship between its mass and the space it occupies. In 2008, the artist held his solo show also at Gallery 2, where he installed 104 cubes of 17x17x17cm on the floor. The little cubes arranged in good order looked simple and strong through the dimmed light under the high ceiling. In this show, he stages 30 spheres of 50cm diameter in a rather loose and free manner.

Neither mimicking an outer object nor representing a specific shape, Choi merely cuts, beats, and heats the iron to extract a basic figure. When he keeps beating the iron rod into a plate, cutting it, and assembling the small pieces into something else, it is such a tough labor but through which the artist concentrates on the simple and repeating action and its result which could be also called ‘traces’ or ‘indices’ of the action. For the long time of working, Choi reconsiders the materiality of iron and its mass laid in the space, allowing a small hole or gap to appear in an organic and arbitrary way to cause diverse expressions.

“The surface of the thing shows its best expression when it takes the simplest form,” Choi said. Indeed, his sculpture has the same size and shape, but each piece has its unique surface with different expression like the human faces showing different personality respectively.

While the ‘untitled’ cubes in 2008 looked like a stubborn ‘man’ who was apparently solid and heavy but suggested a suffering in fold, this ‘untitled’ spheres appear as a brighter, softer, and subtler ‘woman’ who at first looks similar to that man in its entire figure but expresses herself in a variety of light and cheerful texture. The lighthearted rhythm through repetition and variation of straight and curved lines is so warm and tender as the sound of spring comes out of the frozen world. 
Installation View