Two Gardens: Where Imagination and Reality Converge
What does a garden signify to humans? A garden is not merely a space for decoration or relaxation, but rather, it acquires different meanings depending on what and where it is placed. Sometimes it is symbolic, other times meditative, and occasionally, it exists as a space for introspection. It can become a space that embodies limitless meanings.
Choi Myung-Ae, her House is a wooden house surrounded by a garden. The garden has been carefully nurtured by her for over 20 years. It would be more appropriate to say that the garden, rather than being decorated, is a space that encapsulates her unexpressed sensibilities. Therefore, it holds even more significance and special meaning for her. The garden located behind her house features a spacious lawn and large pine trees, creating a serene landscape. In contrast, the garden in front of the house is filled with various flowers, with a charming narrow pathway for solitary strolls. From roses and hydrangeas to azalea, hydrangea, lilac, chrysanthemum, persimmon tree, maple tree, and succulent plants, this cozy space, though not grand in scale, is adorned with glistening flower hues, fragrances carried by the wind, and crawling insects, forming an ecological environment that offers visual delight throughout the seasons. Recently, as artist becomes more absorbed in her work, it seems that a deeper spiritual connection is established between artist and the garden. Could it be the start of another phase after a long period of waiting and nurturing? Alongside the flowers, ants, earthworms, magpies, and stray cats, in this small ecological space where living organisms interact, as artist quietly wanders through the gaps between soil, rocks, plants, and trees, the garden conveys both spiritual inspiration and physical energy to her. When the breeze carries the fragrance of the garden, it becomes an energy that stimulates sensations beyond the visual realm, a sensation that artist deeply feels in her current artistic endeavors. Such transcendental sensibilities are likely influenced by the constant hiking up and down the nearby Gwanaksan Mountain, where artist receives the vitality of nature and draws inspiration. It is also a result of engaging in open dialogues with everything in the garden without prejudice. The inspiration derived from the awe-inspiring moments between the memories of Gwanaksan forest and the daily interaction within the garden continuously manifests in artist's works.
As the moment when pass through the garden and open the door to the studio, it meets another garden. It is truly a garden enveloped by the works of Choi Myung-Ae, a testament to their neo-naturalistic approach. Her workspace is filled with recently completed pieces, spilling over into the living room and stairs. Unlike the garden adorned in front of the house, the interior is filled with vibrant artworks that transcend abstraction and representation. However, it feels different from when firstly visited the studio last year. It feels like the works are speaking. There is a sense of dialogue and movement within the creations. While artist cautiously explains her works, the pieces themselves naturally engage in conversation. It feels as if the life forms, earthy scents, air, and sounds captured from the garden have been unleashed onto the canvases adorning the living room. It is the beginning of artist's endeavor to create a new garden. It presents a different sensation from the dynamic and tense compositions, bold strokes, and strong colors that characterized the works of the previous year. The tranquil color palette and naturally integrated circular forms exude a stable and gentle flow. artist’s ability to release tension and approach the work with a sense of calmness is evident. The completion of the artworks is more solid, and their sensitivity resonates even deeper. Through flexibility, one can perceive a stronger and clearer message being conveyed.
Choi Myeong-ae's work aims to convey a warning message to humans through nature. The destruction of nature caused by human ignorance and greed may deprive humanity of sustenance, life, solace, and joy. For this reason, she contemplates how to incorporate the world of human relationships intertwined with nature into her artwork. Completing works that seek to heal both artist herself and the viewers is another precious goal for her, though ordinary and universal. Artist’s contemplation, triggered by her interaction with the garden, is an endless cycle. Sometimes, traces of thought connected to Eastern philosophy can be found in her work. The movement of the brush, the core element discussed in Eastern painting theory, plays a crucial role when creating a painting. Rather than simply applying colors with the brush, it is about reflecting the brush's vitality and energy in the painting, creating a sense of rhythmic vitality. Colors, in harmony with light, reflect the representation of objects such as clouds, mountains, rocks, flowers, trees, insects, and birds, embodying the principle of correspondence between painting and reality. One prominent expression frequently observed in her recent work is the connectivity of circles. These large and small circular shapes can resemble clusters or flower buds, bringing a sense of connection and peculiar serenity to the canvas. Circles encompass various meanings. They can represent flowers, seeds containing life, or even symbolize the sun or the moon. They simultaneously serve as symbolic representations of something essential for human existence and embody the relationship between artist, nature, the garden, and the principles of conceptual unity.
What does the garden mean to artist Choi Myeong-ae? It can be presumed that the garden is an open space where she has accumulated the emotions and inspirations that she couldn't express on the canvas. It is a space where she can suppress and store the creative urge that flows from her fingertips to her heart while looking at trees, smelling the fragrance of flowers, and touching the leaves of plants. Now, the neo-naturalist unfolds each of those stored elements and creates another garden. If the previous garden encapsulated the abundance of life with glistening sunlight and dancing breeze, the garden being crafted by the neo-naturalist artist is completed as a fantastical garden that has been dreamed of for a long time with colors, lines, and surfaces that come alive at the tip of the brush. The fantasy that the artist dreams of between the two gardens, oscillating between imagination and reality, becomes a reality.
2023
Cheong Jong-hyo, Chief Curator of Busan Museum of Art
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The Anticipated Return of Neo-Naturalism
Choi’s solo exhibition signals her return as an artist. In 1990, she had her solo show Running Figures in which dynamic figures running through open spaces such as dark fields created tension, while the abstraction created by straight horizontal and vertical brush strokes gave a sense of relative stability—both elements revealing a strong individuality in her works. Inferring from her artist’s note on her period-specific concerns, her work seemed to reflect upon daily life surrounded by the unstable social and political atmosphere of the era. Art critic Seo Seongrok, at the time, made note of three distinct elements in her work, saying that the artist herself was a romantic, an expressionist, and emotionally-venting.
“She is a romantic in her representation of encoded figures using simplified strokes, an expressionist in taking issues with specific events without being descriptive, and lastly, rather emotionally-venting in her free use of color and composition.”
More than 30 years have passed since then, and she has made her return as an artist depicting forests in their natural state. She now continues her work painting ‘our’ shared forest, rather than a personal one, by exploring its essence via illustrative representations. Her past and present works seem quite distinct from each other, yet one may find that they share something in common in their inherently formative contexts.
First of all, one may notice the aforementioned three elements that continue to appear in her present work. Forests have taken place of the runners yet her romantic tendencies are still very much alive in her bold omission and narrative approach to her thoughts on trees, grass, and flowers. Her work is also expressionist in that each element of the forest is not detailed yet she boldly captures a part of the entire forest. Furthermore the bold vertical and horizontal composition and brush strokes appear to be expressive. Finally, her emotionally-venting tendencies live on as this neo-naturalist primarily works with her body rather than simply with her thoughts and emotions. Such elements speak to her longing for an artistic endeavor which has not been forgotten but only been suppressed for the past three decades. It may have been suspended and shut down for a while, but it has been lurking in her mind and is ready to be released.
These are not the only elements running through her work. The geometric and abstract form of expression in her Running Figures series continues to resurface in the present work. The trees, grass, and flowers and the bright colors in her current work are clearly distinct from the runners and darker colors from the past. However, the abstract elements—the bold vertical and horizontal strokes showing up in parts of her work, the abstract elements boldly taking place on her canvas—show the innate formative tendencies in Choi.
Today, her work begins with neo-naturalistic research. Neo-naturalism is based on the idea that desire and perceptions created by human instinct present an extremely personal perspective. According to one of the basic tenets of neo-naturalism, one’s bodily movement precedes one’s thoughts and emotions in reproducing and expressing objects. Thus, one’s individuality and self-centered subjective elements take center stage. As such, Choi continues to work by feeling and expressing both in and through her body. The trees, boulders, and flowers seen in the woods of Mt. Gwanak, which she often hikes, appear in her work. She strives to capture the original shape and texture of the trees and grass comprising the forest without adding or omitting anything. After a morning hike she paints the morning scenery, and on a clear day she pours the memories of the trees of that clear day onto her canvas. Distinct from the common Western style of field drawing, her depictions of the sense of closeness and the liveliness of the forest is an oriental style of reconstruction through the movement of space and time, resulting in a complete personalization of the scene. Painting on a canvas reveals her individuality, just like one’s handwriting does, automatically pouring out, but in the next moment reconstructing, and then adjusting on the canvas.
One may pick up on a few distinct features of her neo-naturalist work. First is conceptuality implying abstraction. The balance of lines and colors in her unique strokes is abstract even though it is a conceptual expression of the forest which has been visually captured. Although she paints trees and flowers, her abstract expressions, free from specific forms and lines, contain a sensibility that is compressed like a poem and abstract like a piece of music. Variations of such elements will be established as her new identity. The second feature is a sense of space. Even though it’s a forest in its natural state, the space in her work crosses the border between nature’s infinite space and mankind’s finite one. Third is her restrained use of colors. By utilizing colors that are neither too strong nor too colorful, it gives the viewer a sense of tranquility and comfort. Even with her bold vertical and horizontal composition, it is the balance in her color palette which maintains the overall harmony of the work.
The effort to depict life, the forest, and painting as being intimate with one another enables her work to reach its completion. Now setting free her suppressed desire to start painting again, with mixed feelings of tension and slight trepidation, she expresses the sensation of facing the forest with her body, rather than with her thoughts and emotions. She is not a person of particular ideology or agenda but is simply in the process of discovering formative language reflecting her shifting personal life. Although her works continue to focus on forests, they aren’t simply about her own forest, but the forest that belongs to all of us. She hopes that by reflecting upon nature her feelings on the beauty depicted on her canvas would radiate outward to those nearby.
She recalls that, in the past, she had thought of the social function of arts amidst the moral and aesthetic debate, and she often felt skeptical of the meaning of art. These days, however, she draws and paints lines and colors to create forests that make her and others’ hearts flutter, and confesses that her work is a poetic expression of her own life.
2022
Cheong Jong-hyo, Chief Curator of Busan Museum of Art