Xooang Choi

 

▷ How did your current body of work begin?
For a long time, I made sculpture in the mode of representation. Then I began to question the sculptural approach of signifying meaning through a finished surface, and my interest shifted to the way the physical conditions encountered in the process of working—materials, objects, environment—come together to constitute a being. The object of my interest is still the ‘body.’ In the beginning it was the human body as an object of representation; now the sculpture itself is a body. Rather than planning the whole process in advance, I work so that prior actions and choices, and the changed material conditions they leave behind, set the direction of what follows. It is a perspective that sees every being not as a completed state but as a process of continual formation.

 

▷ Your work ‘The Garden of Monsters’ has been realized in AR (augmented reality).
I saw the AR realization less as a process of transferring the actual work into a virtual image than as one in which the sculpture enters relation with a new environment and acquires another body. A body that can be encountered directly yet never physically touched will stir a new affect (情動), distinct from that of the actual sculpture. In the process, I was struck by the gestures of the person scanning the sculpture while circling it. I thought of it yet another way a body relates to technology, matter, and space.

 

 

The Garden of Monsters, Paper mache, ink, gelatin, polyester resin, epoxy resin, polyurethane resin, fiber glass, polyurethane varnish, aluminum, steel, stainless steel, 221×101×95cm, 2025

 

 

▷ What do you hope viewers feel in front of it?
Realized in AR, ‘The Garden of Monsters’ overlaps with real space as another body, distinct from sculpture with physical substance, and is experienced through the viewer’s movement and gaze. This is a condition I, too, am encountering for the first time. Within it, I look forward to seeing how ‘The Garden of Monsters’ will be sensed, and what new relations and affects it will bring into being.

 

 

 

Installation View of ‘Where the Small Begins’, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea