Inspired by human movement

Seoyoun Choi (Korea)
Beyond the Infinity II Series: Grab 1
Brass, stainless Steel
Dimensions: 48cm x33cm x 200cm

Image source: NEXUS Multicultural Arts Centre Adelaide

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Karin Beaumont posted me a catalogue from an exhibition she saw in Adelaide: Beyond the Infinity: Rhythmic body jewelry by Seoyoun Choi.

Part of the 13th Biennial Conference of the Jewellers and Metalsmiths Group of Australia, the show included “Body jewellery, framed jewellery and short film”. It ended on Thursday 31st January.

Inside the catalogue I see two small brooches, Communication I, II and Axis I,II. Made of sterling silver and string, both are 2d cut-out human shapes. Rods and arcs overlaying the forms suggest trajectories of human movement. A curved line is like the trail of an elbow arcing upwards. Choi uses models to test the possibility of her works, and many of the works in the catalogue are photographed with people. Some of the pieces are huge, like Grab, are huge, challenging the idea of jewelry as small adornments. These pieces seem to dance with their wearers.

Grab I suggests to me the embodiment of an internal thought of grabbing, that arises in the mind before the gesture physical.

Dong-Gwang Jang, Art Science curator writes in the catalogue:

Titles such as gravity, energy, current, contraction, tension, and movement add more prolific figurative elements her craft. In this context, her work is different from conventional decorative craft. Choi’s crafts, which deserve the title of ‘variable language’, create new figurative vocabulary through movements of the human body…

…Souyoun Choy’s art…generates a visual language with actions, gestures, and rhyof the body. It can be read as plastic arts. But its abstract and transformative nature invades definition. Her artworks function as symbols that signify different forms and meanings in the flow of time and space…

…By making constructive and human-body-reminding forms, Choi weaves fragments of thought and feeling about her jewelry.

….The mixing of three important principles of ‘rhythm’, ‘joy’ and ‘light’, in her metal work becomes a seed of transformative nature in her artworks. “Art is aesthetic form that creates pleasure.” This simple definition of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, is the perfect quotation that helps us understand Choi’s work.

…Choi tries to make ‘amusement forms’ while focusing the importance of undeniable human desires to pursue pleasure….

…Movement is a cure for insecure balance.

…Inevitable frame of time and space becomes philosophical thought on each moment.

…This constant repetition of inevitability and coincidence frames our life in the circle of incessant circulation and hereditary.

…We only recognise time as a small d in this mysterious world.

…Transformation of a small dot, the inevitable gesture for mutation, is a sign that life reinforces the fact that we are still alive.

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