While the virtual world tends to usurp the physical one these days, Jeongmoon Choi has created a unique way to merge the two.
The Korean artist—who studied as a painter—uses various thicknesses and colors of thread, black light,and an architectural approach to create physical manifestations of imaginary digital landscapes. The UV-light room installations—the culmination of years of working with thread, first in frames against white gallery walls and then in sculptural form—evoke Tron-like cityscapes of glowing parallel laser beams. But visitors can actually walk in these environments.
Choi refers to these works as “drawing in space,” or 3D drawings. And while they’re more elaborately constructed than one might realize—threads are precisely attached to a carrying structure, such as wire, and sometimes covered in fluorescent paint—the simplicity of using essentially only lighting and various kinds of fibers to both utterly transform a room and create such a disorienting experience is impressive. However, a common visitor reaction, once the initial disorientation has diminished, is a meditative state spent lost in the examination of the material and the space. The frisson between these reactions and the contradiction between the analog and digital make for an invariably intriguing ongoing project.
