Kukje Gallery is pleased to present [- verse], a solo exhibition by Jae-Eun Choi. Primarily based in Japan and Germany, Choi last exhibited in Korea five years ago at the Rodin Gallery in 2007. Working with diverse mediums ranging from sculpture, installation and architecture, as well as photography, video and sound, Choi continuously fuses delicate and elaborate techniques with monumental scale in works that evoke subtle and profound curiosity about the natural world.
Jae-Eun Choi moved to Berlin in the winter of 2010 and immediately became focused on the large wide-open sky in this northern city. Repeatedly filming the sky, her interest became framed by concepts of infinity. Presented in [- verse] is a new work titled Finitude, an installation comprised of videos that capture the movements of the night sky from dusk til dawn in real-time, together with the sounds of the artist’s footsteps. The work forcefully captures the viewer through a complex juxtaposition of the finite and the infinite. Choi also explores the theme of cycles, in Verse_Puglia, Italy, 2012, through a series of photographs depicting the phases of the sun rising. The Myriad of Things, a body of work that incorporates meticulously drawn words and poems completed on the pages of old books that the artist found on the street, presents a quiet meditation on life through the books’ different paper grains and the traces of time past on the faded papers. With her attention to materials and the everyday rhythms of nature, Jae-Eun Choi continuously explores themes of the finite and infinite, the flow of time, the human perception of these complexities and the cycles inherent in life. In this exhibition, she integrates and expands on these seminal themes by visualizing our lives as being akin to poems in verse.
Jae-Eun Choi was born in 1953 in Seoul, Korea. She has been working primarily in Japan since moving there in the mid-1970s, and has recently moved to Germany where she currently works. In 1985, Choi held her first solo exhibition in Japan with an installation work titled Earth, that explored Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture. Since then she has presented numerous projects and participated in important exhibitions around the world. They include a temporary sculptural installation on the roof of Kyung-Dong Presbyterian Church (1990), The Daejon International Expo (1993), Venerable Seongcheol’s tomb project (1998), Sao Paolo Biennale (1991) and the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1995). Choi has held major solo exhibitions at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo in 2010, where she was the first Korean artist invited by the Museum, as well as the Rodin Gallery in 2007 and Kukje Gallery in 1993.