Janghan Choi | AAARMAGAZINE

Janghan Choi: Multiplicity and Order

By Richard Vine

Walking into a Janghan Choi exhibition, one might easily experience a Pattern and Decoration Movement flashback. And noting his “2D sculpture” method—which involves carved and painted reliefs mounted on canvas—might summon up associations with handicraft. But the U.S.-based Choi, who holds an MFA from Hongik University in his native South Korea, does not make his large, mixed-medium wall works in order to champion the applied arts or assert the aesthetic validity of visual patterning per se. Now in midcareer, he has already established his signature theme: the persistent, often troubled, relationship between humankind and nature. (Indeed, he titled a recent exhibition “Human Evolution” and dubbed every work in it Story in Life Time.) But his creations give that familiar concern, which is fundamental to much traditional Asian art, a decidedly unconventional twist. Rather than seeking reconciliation and harmony, rather than evoking the seasons and the seemingly eternal cycles of life that transcend each fleeting sole existence, Choi emphasizes the human capacity for order and our innate epistemological impulse: the desire to know, and to know how we know.

'Storiesin Lifetme', 2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 70.8”x70.8 in.

Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts

Choi’s simplest works are small square plaques, each inscribed with a circle containing a handful of ambiguous semi-abstract forms. The figures could be rudimentary representations of people, jars, birds, sheep, or what have you. They look as though viewers could read them like ancient petroglyphs, pictures that stand for a word or concept. It’d intriguing to imagine. There is something enchanting about those primal codes, in which (to take the Native American case) a stylized rendering of a teepee means “home,” a turtle designates “protection,” a sun symbol, “happiness.” We feel the aptness of the connections, grounding our thought in daily reality, while simultaneously infusing mundane objects with a power beyond themselves, the power of communication and symbolic thought. One could argue that, although we made enormous gains in complexity and nuance through the development of phonetic alphabets, we also lost a directness and immediacy—qualities revived by modern-day emojis and art projects like Chinese artist Xu Bing’s search for a universal sign language.

But that is not Choi’s aim. We can’t really read his forms individually; their significance lies less in themselves than in their gathering together. Soon we see them, in Choi’s larger works, outside the corralling boundary of the circle, that universal symbol of completeness and perpetuity. At large in the picture field, the squiggles look like scattered tokens of the multifarious, fragmented nature of experience. This was one of the great contributions—if that is the right word—of Modernism, making possible the revolutionizing of old conceptual hierarchies (“God’s in his heaven— / All’s right with the world”) and the advent of “distributed” systems, composed of ontologically equal, constantly interacting bits. Thus many of Choi’s works are large rectangular panels covered edge-to-edge with cryptic forms, dense as an urban map.

'Storiesin Lifetme', 2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 70.8 x144 in. (70.8 x 36 in. each x 4). Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts

But then the circle reasserts itself: the quasi-figurative forms line up, as if radiating from the picture’s center, creating a circle rather than being confined by one. These works recall Buddhist mandalas, emblems of a perfect universe. Other compositions, meanwhile, array the forms in grid-like ranks suggesting earthly discipline. Finally, Choi creates multi-panel works that combine these formal principles. Rectangular panels flank a circle-bearing panel, and vice versa. Forms in regimented ranks are juxtaposed with others assembled into geometric shapes. In short, the small visual components are regulated into patterns by organizing principles that are themselves subject to a second order of organization. The colors—blue, red, brown, white, yellow—are basic, used to assert their own presence, not to describe objects or signal emotions. We are reminded of charts, maps, family trees, matrixes, typologies.

What, then, is the work about? In some ways, it echoes Scatter Art—that core technique of today’s ubiquitous installation projects, derived originally from the archeological use of the term “scatter” to denote the original chance distribution of artifacts across an excavation site. As with this source, Choi’s art involves transforming random, confusing scraps into a meaningful arrangement, a chaos we can comprehend. This is the very heart of our epistemological imperative.

'Storiesin Lifetme series 1-8', 2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 7.8 x 7.8 in. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts

As humans, we are largely defined by our ability to order external and internal phenomena through language—a talent in which we greatly surpass all other lifeforms on earth. To be human, it might be said, is to be a creature of language. This ordering and symbolizing of our perceptions, enabling us not only to express thoughts to our fellows but sometimes to generate new perceptions from the interplay of ideas themselves, is manifest in many types of language—verbal, mathematical, semiotic, and (as in Choi’s case) artistic. For over two centuries now, the most critical issue in philosophy has been the battle between mythopoeic language and the language of empiricism and logic.

Prior to the 17th century, our principal means of apprehending the world, and the principal language for expressing that apprehension, was mythopoesis—the fabrication of legends, characters, fables, oracles, magic spells, and religions. From the Greek pantheon to Christianity’s Great Chain of Being, from astrology to Buddhism, the belief prevailed that the world is at once ordered and complicated by willful forces that must be decrypted and appeased. That is what passed for “enlightenment” in the pre-modern world. But in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Age of Enlightenment in a new sense of the word, that darkness, that impassioned muddle, was dispelled by empiricism. A new dispensation, the scientific method, replaced faith and intuition with the impersonal processes of investigation, rational inference, and testing, thus forcing even the longest traditions and strongest inner conviction to yield to the demands of proof.

Immanuel Kant, however, soon recognized a troubling limitation—almost a contradiction—in objective science: it is performed by human beings, and human apprehension is always, inescapably, mediated by a finite number of modalities (e.g., time and space), or cognitive “filters” as we say now, that condition our reading of the world.

'Storiesin Lifetme, 2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 46 x 35.8 in. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts

To this grand caveat later thinkers added another. The objects and relationships that come to our minds only through preexisting sensory and conceptual filters, several key 20th-century figures noted, are then subject to a second level of mediation—that of language, which is limited and flawed, even when channeled through the pen of a Shakespeare. Discourse can never be truly crystalline, because language, a system of aural and visual signs, never equates perfectly to “the thing as in itself it really is.” It is only a kind of metaphoric grunting about objects as they appear and interact in the world, a human noise that sometimes rises to insight and elegance, but never attains pure transparency, to say nothing of absolute identity with its subjects.

In response to this recognition, Anglo-American philosophers tried to make their language practice as precise as humanly possible, while those on the Continent and elsewhere reembraced poeticism. (Foucault writes powerfully, to great emotional effect—but don’t count on him to accurately describe the real-world functioning of hospitals, prisons, or love relationships. Don’t ask him for data to support his ominous tropes and assertions, his exquisite frissons.) The finest contribution of recent Continental philosophers is that, in rejecting Anglo-American systematization of intellectual discourse, they came to see—and to reveal—the pervasiveness of conceptual systems throughout society, unveiling procedures that have become so routine, so ingrained, that they seem natural and inevitable, when in fact they are constructed and elective. Linnaeus, they would argue, documented not the natural world per se but the mechanics of his own intricate taxonomy (kingdom, phylum, class, all the way down to species)—an artifice, a mental projection upon the profusion of life. So too did colonialists and racists.

'Storiesin Lifetme series', 2023, Mixed Media on Canvas, 35.8 x 46 in.

Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts

Asian art has long been more conceptual than descriptive, more about the spiritual essence of a depicted object or scene than about its verisimilitude. A traditional Asian landscape painting seeks to convey the idea of a natural scene rather than to inventory its parts and mimic its appearance. From an Eastern point of view, traditional Western images are plagued by fussy details and the dangerous illusion that one is actually beholding the objects, people, and locations represented. Abstract Expression, a style alluded to in Choi’s “allover” pictures, was to some extent a triumph of Asian-style picture making on Westerns shores, complete with the flow of qi (cosmic life-force) though the artist’s body and brush—though often with a grandiosity of scale that serves emotionally tumultuous rather than pacific ends.

A product of both cultures, Choi’s work mixes rigorous patterning and random shards, systems of ordering and hints of a reality that eludes any schema, the empirical impulse and the old mythopoetic dreamwork. His images do not resolve this contradiction—perhaps nothing can—but they make it vivid, rich, and coolly memorable.

Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America. He holds a PhD in literature from the University of Chicago and previously served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review and of Dialogue: An Art Journal. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. Some three hundred of his articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in various journals, including Art in America, Salmagundi, the Georgia Review, Tema Celeste, Modern Poetry Studies, and the New Criterion. He has made presentations at more than 125 universities, museums, and other cultural venues in cities throughout the US and abroad, including Venice, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Saint Petersburg. His critical books include the career survey Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches, and Drawings (2001) and New China, New Art (2008), which traces the emergence of avant-garde art in post-Mao China. In 2016 Richard published the crime novel SoHo Sins, set in the New York art world of the 1990s. In addition, he has co-curated exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2013); the National Academy of Art in New Delhi, India (2015); and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York (2016). He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and the high-IQ society, Mensa.

Chief Editor Paris Koh