The daughter of a sculptor and a painter, the Korean native was surrounded by creativity from a young age. \u201cIt was natural for me to follow in their footsteps,\u201d she says while sitting in her Prenzlauer Berg studio, citing Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof, and Rebecca Horn as some of her earliest inspirations.<\/p>\n
Choi\u2019s admiration of Horn in particular was so strong that it inspired her to move from Korea to the German capital in 2001 with the hope of taking the artist\u2019s class at Berlin\u2019s University of the Arts (UdK). Although this never transpired, Choi did, however, enroll in the institution\u2019s Visual Communications and Media Art undergraduate degree, a decision inspired by seeing films by UdK students shown on screens usually used for advertising in Berlin\u2019s U-bahn network. \u201cI didn\u2019t have much interest in exhibiting in white cube spaces at the time. I wanted to try a different access point, and experiment with film and new media,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Since completing her bachelor\u2019s degree, Choi has worked as an independent video and media artist exhibiting her work in international institutions including across Germany, Korea, and the U.S. She does admit, however, that transitioning from university to working as a professional in the art industry was tough. \u201cWe never really learnt about how to make a living. Many people think artists just need to be talented or naturally gifted, but you also have to have vast amounts of knowledge about practical things like calculating tax, protecting your copyright, and how to earn a sustainable income. It took me a while, but I\u2019m getting there, slowly.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she first graduated, Choi mainly focused on producing work that intersected with alternative disciplines such as dance and science.<\/p>\n
But in 2016, the artist came to a turning point in her practice. \u201cI started really thinking about my background and heritage,\u201d Choi explains, adding that she was particularly interested in her grandmother\u2019s story of travelling from her home country of Japan to Korea to be with Choi\u2019s grandfather, who she had met while he was working as a labourer in Japan. \u201cI decided to work on a project tracing this journey.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Titled Re move <\/em>(2017), <\/em>the work saw Choi record interviews with her grandmother and hundreds of other women from Japan, Germany, and Korea who migrated from their homes after World War II. \u201cI discovered that they all have a very specific way of viewing the world. I would ask them some quite random questions, like \u2018what is a ritual,\u2019 for example, and they would answer in really amazing ways. They have this wisdom that comes with maturity. I interviewed some men with similar experiences too, because in the beginning I thought gender wouldn\u2019t make much of a difference. But it\u2019s actually really different when men and women speak. I think it\u2019s important to think about why that is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Since Re move<\/em>, Choi has worked on many other projects that focus on the lives and stories of women. \u201cI\u2019ve recently got married and had a baby. I think this has made me focus on this area even more,\u201d she explains. One such project is Mytikiana <\/em>(2019), an 18 minute long video installation based on research into Japanese military comfort women: women and girls who volunteered or were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories\u2014Korea being one\u2014before and during World War II.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Choi initially recorded interviews with former comfort women still alive today, she couldn\u2019t get away from the worry that she was objectifying them and their stories, especially considering the amount of times they\u2019d been theatrically portrayed in the media before. It wasn\u2019t until a research group at UdK who were looking into the subject came to Choi that she resumed her research. \u201cAt first I said I didn\u2019t want to work on the topic anymore. But then they told me they\u2019d found evidence of around twenty comfort women from Burma, none of whom had shared their stories before. I thought it was very important to think about why they\u2019d decided to stay silent.\u201d As a result, Choi created a film in which three actors portray Burmese comfort women. Delivering text based on the research compiled by the university, films of their faces are accompanied by animations of rotating forms akin to space hardware. \u201cThese circulating images reflect how topics such as this one can be seen from different perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n The topic of comfort women is still a very sensitive subject in Japan and Korea. \u201cI think this situation won\u2019t end until the generation that experienced it passed away,\u201d says Choi. As a result, she sometimes feels like her work on the subject is \u201cnot so welcome\u201d in Korea.<\/p>\n Choi is no stranger to creating safe spaces to discuss difficult issues: in 2014, she co-founded NON Berlin\u2014a Berlin-based platform for Asian contemporary art\u2014with Korean architect Ido Shin. \u201cI\u2019ve met a lot of curators who have pigeon holed me as a female, Asian artist. But then, when I\u2019ve been in Korea, I\u2019ve also met people who have told me my work is very German,\u201d she explains. \u201cThis got me thinking about what it means to be a German artist, what it means to be a Korean artist, and the intersections between the two. I wanted to make some friends who were thinking about similar topics, and that\u2019s why I started NON Berlin.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Based alongside Choi\u2019s studio in Prenzlauer Berg, NON Berlin usually hosts shows two to three times per year. This has, however, like every other aspect of Choi\u2019s work and the art industry in general, been disrupted by the global coronavirus crisis. But despite the challenges resulting from the pandemic, Choi believes it has also given her time to ask herself some interesting questions. \u201cI have always been thinking about which will be the winner: the virtual or the real world. I think now, due to COVID-19, the virtual side has won,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m really thinking about how I can use this opportunity to show new work in a digital space.\u201d<\/p>\n While some may think this may be easy for a media artist, Choi argues it\u2019s not that simple. \u201cPeople think that films can just be translated online. But many of my films are installations that are intended to be shown in specific spaces. Now that can\u2019t happen, I think I\u2019m going to have to change my methods, and make my work conceptually different from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When asked how she first got into art, Chansook Choi jokes that she didn\u2019t have much of a choice. The daughter of a sculptor and a painter, the Korean native was surrounded by creativity from a young age. \u201cIt was natural for me to follow in their footsteps,\u201d she says while sitting in her Prenzlauer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":8975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,104],"tags":[32,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8934"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8934"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8988,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8934\/revisions\/8988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cIt\u2019s very important to speak about it in an art context. It feels like a safe space to talk about polarised issues.\u201d<\/h6>\n