December 12~16, 2019

Opening Reception: Thursday, December 12th 6-8pm

Further Reading - “The Paintings of Boon-Ja Choi:”

by Eleanor Heartney

Western thought is full of stark oppositions: nature versus culture, mind versus body, thought versus feeling, tradition versus modernity, and not least, East versus West. Such habits have shaped the evolution of Modern art in the west by demanding that artists make choices between these pairs of concepts. Thus, for example, an artist like Jackson Pollock was celebrated for his ability to circumvent his conscious mind and create art from the depths of his unthinking desires. On the other hand, and artist like Frank Stella found it necessary to proclaim, “What you see is what you see” about paintings which supposedly bore no traces of the inner man. And both of these artists, along with the whole cavalcade of modern artists, claimed to be absolutely original, owing nothing to the art which came before.

In the East, artists have not been so bound by this either/or mentality. As a result, they have been able to combine seeming opposites into an harmonious whole. Nowhere is this capacity for reconciliation more evident than in the work of Bonn-Ja Choi.

As an artist born and educated in Korea before moving to the United States in 1975, Choi is well versed in the techniques of traditional Korean ink painting. Her early work demonstrated her mastery of this form. These works featured rippling fields of marks built from simple black brush strokes which rolled effortlessly across the white rice paper. These early pieces hover between abstraction and representation, at times breaking into stylized images of trees or clouds which recall the delicate landscapes of ancient Korean masters.

In 1984, Choi began to add color to her work, at first by using colored inks and then metallic acrylic paints. The paints required a sturdier backing, so she mounted her preliminary brush and ink drawings on canvas. Adding paint to the tiny spaces between her black brush strokes, she built compositions out of tiny slivers of vibrant color. These works, which gleam and shimmer when light hits the metallic hues, have the quality of jeweled mosaics.

In some of her more recent works, Choi has begun to apply a variety of colors, not only to the spaces between, but also to the separating strokes themselves. With this approach, she has been able to create luminous fields of color whose edges dissolve as flashes of color bounce off each other like bits of reflected light. With their dancing brush strokes and surface rhythms, Choi`s recent paintings recall the perfectly controlled gestures of traditional Oriental landscape paintings. At the same time one can also see in them a kinship to the sun dappled pointillism of French post impressionist Georges Seraut or the “over-all” compositions pioneered by the American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock.

Faced with these works, the Westerner tends to ask, Is Choi an artist of the West or of the East? Is she an abstract artist or a painter of stylized landscapes? Is her work spontaneous or calculated? Is she traditional of modern?

The answer to all these questions is, of course, that both are true. Choi makes such distinctions irrelevant. Instead of searching for labels and categories, the viewer is better rewarded by focusing on the paintings themselves and observing the ways in which each offers a unique experience. Only then does it become clear how flexible Choi`s method is.

“Contemplation Landscape” 1991, for instance, bristles with the undulating energy created by arching waves of autumnal colors. Broken into tiny shards, each silver is outlined by surrounding brush strokes in lighter colors. This gives them the appearance of being tipped with light. Swaying in different directions, these cascades of color sweep across the canvas like strands of long grass pulled this way and that by the wind.

Meanwhile, “Contemplation Mountain” 1989 suggests a less turbulent energy. The rolling motion of “Contemplation Landscape” has given way here to a shimmering effect produced by small strokes of luminous color which are woven carefully together. Viewed close up, one sees simply a vibrating surface, but from a distance the tiny flecks of yellow, gold, orange, crimson, lavender and black begin to suggest masses of light and shadow whose edges dissolve almost imperceptibly into each other.

In sharp contrast, “Contemplation Sea II” from 1991, suggests and energy gone confrontational. Here one senses the clash of opposing forces in the interactions between the darker, curling masses in the bottom half of the canvas and the whorl of golden shards which sweep above. The title encourages the viewer to read a watery motion into the composition. Thus, the swirling marks might be seen as ripples on the agitated surface of the ocean, or as the crash of waves breaking against each other.

As these examples suggest, it is almost impossible to describe Choi`s work without reference to landscape metaphors. And yet, these are not landscape paintings in any conventional sense of the term. One rarely glimpses anything which might read as an horizon line or even a division of space into foreground and background.

Instead the landscape quality seems to derive from the evocation of elemental natural forces – one senses at times the effects of wind, fire and water. Plunging the viewer into the midst of this energy, Choi avoids the distancing effect of traditional western perspective which places the viewer safely outside the action depicted in the painting. Here one feels submerged in the action.

On the other hand, however, the meticulous rendering of the brush strokes and flecks of color are evidence of restraint and self awareness. Thus, the energy suggested here is carefully controlled, not at all like the all encompassing immersion which finds its most complete illustration in the wild emotionalism of western expressionism. Here again, Choi finds the mean, neither insisting on nor negating the assertion of the artist`s ego in the work.

This may be the aspect of her paintings which owes the most to her Eastern identity. Though these are works of breathtaking originality, they do not flash that uniqueness like a badge of honor. Instead, they willingly acknowledge their connections both to traditional Korean painting and to the explorations of western modernists from the Impressionists to the Cubists to the Expressionists. Spanning a succession of supposedly unbridgeable chasms, the paintings of Boon-Ja Choi reveal the harmony that grows out of diversity. Thus, they remind us that, even in our fragmented and divisive world, it is still possible for art to bring us together.

Eleanor Heartney is a contributing editor for Art in America and the author of Art & Today (Phaidon, 2008) and co-author of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (Prestel, 2007)