DAESUN CHOI

I was born in Seoul, Korea. I have been interested in drawing since I was in elementary school and my school teachers recommended me to major in art, but I gave up art in high school due to my father's opposition.
I majored in Chinese literature in college. Even before Korea established diplomatic...

I was born in Seoul, Korea. I have been interested in drawing since I was in elementary school and my school teachers recommended me to major in art, but I gave up art in high school due to my father's opposition.
I majored in Chinese literature in college. Even before Korea established diplomatic ties with China, I had a lot of interest in China's political situation. When I was a college student, I stayed in Taipei to study Chinese as an exchange student, and I was able to look at one aspect of Chinese culture through Taiwan.
After graduating from college, Korea's economic situation became so bad that I had to go to Hong Kong to find a job.
I have been working between Hong Kong and Guangdong for several years, and after moving to a trading company in Korea, I was sent back to Shanghai, China, where I worked for about a decade. There was a financial crisis from the U.S. at the time and Shanghai's workplace was also affected and very dangerous. I quit my job and traveled for a year to China's regions, including Jilin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Sichuan, as well as Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and Nara.
I seriously considered the path of life that I had never thought deeply about. I wanted to choose a way of freely pioneering my life rather than a career swayed by circumstances. I have been interested in art since I was young, but I didn't think I could do it myself until then. I always thought it was wonderful to express what I saw and felt in the language of art. I posted an article on the Internet community and asked publicly how to start art.
Just in time, there was feedback from an art teacher in Changwon, Korea, and I came right back from China to start art in that strange city.
In the first few years, I painted nude and landscape in oil media, and one day I fell in love with newspaper materials. I've seen many people use newspapers only as stuff that fills part of the background, rather than as good materials or as a topic itself. I found newspaper materials excellent in plasticity when they met water and glue and also noted that the newspaper itself is a medium full of textual language and photographs.
In South Korea, newspapers are dominated by several nepotistic media with history and power, who have distorted public opinion by only representing the interests of large corporations and vested interests rather than representing the truth, although they have strong social influence.
I was deeply interested in the influence of letters and language on the world.
I've been making abstracts using newspapers as objects for the past decade. I used to think that if Korea's nepotism newspapers distort the world by distorting public opinion with texts and pictures full of them, I would send their newspapers to a completely different world.
For a long time, people have viewed, reasoned and changed the world through the newspaper. Nowadays the emergences of broadcasting, the Internet and the SNS have been weakening the power of the newspaper. Even so, these new alternative media have the same essence as the newspaper - to mirror the world - so that they have the same essence as the newspaper. Thus, despite of the emergence of such alternative media, the newspaper still maintains its traditional representative nature.
I take note of such representative nature of the newspaper mirroring the secular world. To me, the newspaper as a medium of such a primary entity becomes a representative object for a symbol referring to the secular world. Newspaper as the symbol of the secular world is torn down into small pieces and put in the water and passed through a long mature period by me. Through such a process, types and photos by means of which the secular world was described and expressed are all dropped out of paper and the newspaper turn into a sticky liquid gray object. Separate events in different times and spaces can be converged into a place. So to speak, the 3 dimensional events are turned into the 5 dimensional ones.
On such a new space over the scope of the 3 dimensional, I start to spread my own narrative. The symbolic meaning of the newspaper in our own secular world and the desire for an eternal world beyond the secular world long explored by man, these two are the main elements of my process of work that progresses like a ritual, through which I imply another eternal world that transcends the limits of written language and photography.
I've been using paper string as a material in addition to newspaper recently. Sometimes I want to make a work without using canvas. I will do works that can express my identity as a Korean but also show universal human emotions.