Arang Choi
Symbiosis
6 September – 19 October 2024
“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach.” (Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, 1974).
The wonderful and fantastic thing about art is that it offers complete freedom. This idea, captured by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington in The Hearing Trumpet, shows just that. Anything you can imagine can somehow be realized in art. In this sense, painting and writing share a number of similarities.
Arang Choi, born in 1992 in Seoul, choose painting – not abstract works, but figurative ones that only appear clear at first glance. Because we can see eyes, we believe we are recognizing a figure. Yet, upon closer inspection, they reveal much more complexity.
In Choi’s oil paintings, we repeatedly encounter a figure whose body seems to transform before our eyes, as though it has the potential to change form at any moment. This being is Emulb – read backward, it spells “Blume” (German for flower). A fictional creature moving through a world that unfolds in bizarre beauty across Choi’s varied works. Emulb is not just a figure or a state – it is an all-encompassing idea that runs through each piece.
A focal point in Choi’s work is the large-scale painting Crystaltree (2024), which is structured like a Renaissance painting. Here, Emulb hides behind an amorphous tree, while two snakes entwine in the foreground. A Western viewer may immediately think of biblical tales, but Emulb is unconcerned with such historical associations. Peeking out from behind a wavering cloud, Emulb seems to anticipate a new discovery just around the corner. Choi doesn’t consciously draw on ancient imagery, her inspiration comes from nature documentaries and her own experiences.
In Rock Garden or somewhere in between (2024), Emulb attempts to hide behind a curtain, which cascades in folds across the foreground, or perhaps is pulling it away from its face upon waking. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the world suggests it is a body of infinite folds, moving through time and space. Here, the idea is that each fold contains a universe of ideas and possibilities.
Like in a never-ending dream, we move through Choi’s paintings, inhabiting her unique universe. This is a world with its own physical laws, its own vegetation – somehow realistic, yet utterly fantastic at the same time.
It feels as if, upon letting yourself fall into this world, you would sink softly into mossy ground. One can even imagine the scent of this place: slightly woody, fresh, with an undertone of something floral.
Choi’s new realms, inspired by nature, allow an escape from the hard, concrete reality. This is a cosmos where one can outwit the rationality that limits imagination. Possibly, rather than fleeing into a parallel world, it’s about finding the encouragement to reshape the world around us.
Her paintings possess a kind of playfulness that is far from frivolous. It’s almost seductive how the creatures and their textures reveal themselves—sometimes feather-soft, sometimes smooth and cool. Always observing the strange world around them with watchful eyes, these beings may be more similar to us than they seem, and Choi’s paintings much more realistic than we might think at first sight.
Choi lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, until 2023 (under Prof. Kirsi Mikkola, Daniel Richter, Francis Ruyter, and Alastair MacKinven) and at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, until 2021 (under Prof. Andreas Schulze).
Selected exhibitions include solo shows at Gallery Kiche, Seoul; Spark Artfair, Vienna; Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Salzburg; in St. Tropez; Vienna and London.
– Text by Laura Helena Wurth