CHOI’S WORLD:
THE ART OF CHOI OK YEUNG

Some artists are known for their use of watercolor or oil paint;
others for their work in plaster or bronze; still others become celebrated for handling unconventional materials like wax, cement, felt or blocks of fat. Artist Choi Ok Yeung, for his part, first gained notoriety in his native South Korea more than three decades ago for using a far earthier medium—cow dung.

The most elemental of materials, manure has been known to suggest both feculence and fertility. African art has long incorporated it—as witnessed in encyclopedic museum collections around the world, which often display African masks made of wood, metal and animal waste. In the case of one contemporary European artist, dung has been used in place of paint to make sepia-tinted paintings and drawings that recall Albrecht Dürer prints and Mark Tansey oils.
Famously, British artist Chris Ofili’s portrait of the Holy Virgin Mary (1996) incorporated elephant dung into its depiction of the Sanctissima. The work, part of the controversial 1998 Brooklyn Museum exhibition Sensation, later became an unprecedented succès de scandale. (On a related note, Old Master painters also used mummy brown, a pigment consisting of pulverized Egyptian mummies, providing echoes of morbidity for many of the shadows animating 18th-century European religious canvases.)

For Choi, an artist born and raised in the coastal city of Gangneung—surrounded by mountains and looking East toward the East Sea (Sea of Japan)—dung became an experimental material with which to encompass the entirety of his imagination; a terrain where landscape was expansively understood to include both natural and spiritual phenomena, and which the artist could catalyze to push past the boundaries of conventional art making and traditional art spaces. For Choi, this vibrant landscape included mountains, valleys, rivers, seas, and all the walking, flying and crawling critters that germinate it. At once elemental and ubiquitous, the material the artist chose to represent his surroundings didn’t just capture the landscape’s regenerative essence, it also channeled the terrain’s constantly evolving ecology.

After establishing a workshop at the foot of a mountain in Wangsan, Choi let his often XXL-sized sculptures “roam” the landscape. At times they appeared in such profusion as to seem to have sprouted up from the ground like so many cham-neauteh (Korean oyster) mushrooms. Like other artists who pioneered what we today call Land Art—among them, Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson—the Korean creator moved beyond museums and galleries directly into nature. In place of white walls, his framing devices became distant horizon lines and vast outdoor expanses; instead of epoxy or plaster, he found a métier among the realm of soil, trees, dirt, dung, and the integrality of a living landscape. Until 2002, that is. That was the fateful year his studio and sculptures were swept away by the massive downpour and landslides occasioned by Typhoon Rusa—the most powerful storm to strike South Korea in nearly half a century.

After losing the vast majority of his artworks, Choi turned his attention to an unlikely endeavor: designing the foothills of Hassla Art World, the spectacular sculpture park that model Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. An 11-hectare ramble that includes forests, hills, lanes, boardwalks, sculptures and various kinds of other artistic interventions, Hassla has revived the full body buzz Choi felt while making sculpture amid the natural environs of his Wangsan studio. Additionally, the artist has managed to expertly channel the spirit of earlier land art visionaries during this post-Rusa chapter of his practice. Like Goldsworthy, Choi’s artworks at Hassla and other sites recognize “movement, change, light, growth, and decay” as both “the lifeblood of nature,” but also as constitutive of the fundamental “energies” that animate artworks made both in and with nature.
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In 2015 and 2017, Choi made several trips to Cambodia to explore additional working landscapes. While there he imagined and installed giant baskets and gates throughout the area’s dun-colored terrain. Woven entirely from bamboo and reeds with the help of a team of builders, the structures straddle the landscape like mammoth figures. Alternately, they also span water sources like improvised piers—non-instrumentalized lookouts with which to reconsider connections to nature and reestablish newfound relations with their surroundings. Later, in 2019, at the behest of the county of Youngwol, he and his wife, Park Shin Jung, turned a compound of buildings previously known as the Suloseam Museum—a traditional “liquor museum”—into a new arts space. Making little distinction between inside and outside, their evolving contributions have involved refurbishing existing structures with nature-oriented pavilions and pantheons. Taken together, they embody an approach to land art that is both resoundingly local and ambitiously global.

Summarized by the Korean characters 仰天, meaning “looking up to the sky,” the couple’s approach weaves rough squares with Choi’s ethic of creating sculptural and architectural interventions while reflecting consistently upon nature. One such intervention is the aptly titled “Pine Pantheon.” A massive, circular, shed-like structure made from what appear to be more than 200 pieces of juts threaded diagonally into the landscape—it measures 15 meters in height and 12 meters in diameter—its intense pine smell synesthetically points to the immersive sculpture’s relationship to the site’s nearby forests. To quote land art pioneer Walter de Maria, “Every work of art should have at least ten meanings.” In Choi’s case, his artworks contain multiples of these, all interacting with the environment from which they chiefly take inspiration.

If the viewer’s gaze is fittingly drawn skywards once inside the “Pine Pantheon,” a similar enveloping effect is achieved when walking through the bamboo-like scaffolding of the “Red Pavilion.” An extensive yet networked set of constructions, the flaring structure both encompasses and sets off several single-and-two-story white buildings using a walkway, but also through the sheer monumentality of the complex. Made from repurposed materials, the pavilion constitutes a piece of outdoor architecture that suggests an ascendant, perhaps even urgent, reality within the site’s topography and color scheme. A marker of both chaos and order in vermillion, nature’s most brilliant color, the “Red Pavilion” also invokes the bacteria and algae that periodically turn Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) red—“the color of tomato soup,” according to the late sculptor—while recalling the way Choi’s American predecessor established the measure of his own work: “Size determines an object, but scale determines art.”

In the manner of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Choi and Park have found inspiration in both natural (rocks from the complex’s stone walls) and recycled materials (steel pipes salvaged from the demolition of existing buildings), but this only hints at the reach of their environmental aesthetic. Choi once described his notion of landscape as “a place of beauty that pursues a pure form of plasticity that accentuates simple and primordial power.” The artist’s description of nature as a favored site for his artwork extends out to his oeuvre like a statement of purpose. Whether expressed through discrete works such as his drawings (his “Faces of the Universe” series), his sculptures done in materials like dung, wood, and rope, or through his carved cement (his “The Thousand Faces” series), or through more expansive, land-based artworks, Choi’s creations hew to a fundamental guiding principle. They turn viewers into far more than spectators. In Choi’s immersive world, art lovers become participants.

Christian Viveros-Fauné, Brooklyn, 2024