Lot 1655: CHOI ZAN

CHOI ZAN
(B. 1980)
Weeping Woman; Happy tears; & Rabbit
two sticker on acrylic; sticker on FRP sculpture
65.5 x 55 cm. (25 3/4 x 21 5/8 in.); 95 x 95 cm. (37 3/8 x 37 3/8 in.); 28 x 48 x 100 cm. (11 x 18 7/8 x 39 3/8 in.)
Executed in 2008 & 2009 (3)

Seoul, Korea, Gallery Sejul, Funny Sculpture! Funny Painting!, 17 July-14 August, 2009.

Gallery Sejul, Funny Sculpture! Funny Painting!, exh. cat., Seoul, Korea, 2009 (illustrated, p. 9).

Critical of contemporary society's rampant materialism and consumerism, Choi Zan aims at exhibiting the complexity of art's position in relation to the natural pressure to media, and its push towards popular culture. By recreating masterpieces in easily disposable mediums of stickers, he makes a willful protest against the commodity form through his act of mass producing readymade images and material to swindle his low art into a deceptively charming high art.

Eloquently utilizing the economical and artificial quality of acrylic, Choi adroitly cuts sharp geometrical and constructivist shapes of Cubism and crisp pure contours of Pop Art as a basis to his later mass application of advertisement stickers. Effectively using the iconic works as a cultural emblem, Choi designs, and, manufactures his own stickers in far relevance to the visual motif by printing words that entails a cliche logo, normally deemed as lower class to elevate further the phenomena of reproduction. Choi consciously selects images that are thought provoking and figuratively embedded with societal and cultural impact as he covers a smooth-scale of shiny silver in Rabbit (Lot 1655) to demonstrate its stabilized connotation as a new form of low-art, a notable conceptual emblem in contemporary art; Happy Tears (Lot 1655) as a blunt symbol of Pop culture itself; and the art-historical significance of Weeping Woman (Lot 1655) as an iconic emblem, frequently exemplified in various reproductions by the media.

While pleasing in aesthetics with its familiar exposure and as culture's commodity as lavish entities, the works of Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons are merely a critical replica that entails Choi's wry and witty commentary on society's inclination towards materialistic possessions, and furthermore in arts. Perhaps to state that even the most meticulously exact reproduction of an art work will never contain the same presence in time and space as the original work, Choi awakens the viewer's consumerist fascination with these work, as with scrutiny we realize the temporal, substandard usage of stickers that advertise fast food restaurants, dry cleaners and real estate, diminishing our instinctive longing for his work and replacing it with self reflection on our tendencies for consumerism.