From the
first tentative scratches in charcoal on a cave wall to the airbrushed stencil
edges of Banksy, the line has a long and venerable history in the world of
artistic expression. Jengmoon Choi used to be a painter and very likely in the
mode of many before her she would have, first of her own freewill, and then
under the tutelage of others, undergone the experience of drawing. The desire to
leave a mark delineates those who choose to make art and those who do not. Or
does It ?
In Choi's
latest installation in the back streets of Millbay, amongst black nondescript industrial units in
the city of Plymouth, the audience are invited to partake as part of the work,
figures in a new three dimensional landscape. Cast as explorer, people weave in and out of ultraviolet looms, their black
shadows intersecting the white threads, shining as if electric blue in hue, like laser
beams under the UV lights.
TRON jokes aside, the mainframe references soon shut down and the environment becomes more intimate.This is craft and one is reminded of string art and the parabola and parabolic sections we all made as children. You must remember the mathematics demonstration that used a right angle with numbers on both the vertical and horizontal lines that when connected with a ruler and some straight lines created a curve? There is an element of that here, but more like the thread based versions executed between pins on a black material covered board. It is an alternate reality like cotton 8-bit, one created with thread and not lasers, simple UV contrast and not holograms.
TRON jokes aside, the mainframe references soon shut down and the environment becomes more intimate.This is craft and one is reminded of string art and the parabola and parabolic sections we all made as children. You must remember the mathematics demonstration that used a right angle with numbers on both the vertical and horizontal lines that when connected with a ruler and some straight lines created a curve? There is an element of that here, but more like the thread based versions executed between pins on a black material covered board. It is an alternate reality like cotton 8-bit, one created with thread and not lasers, simple UV contrast and not holograms.
The
intersections created with each net subdivide the gallery space and encourage
the viewer to see the world anew. We are used to seeing the floor as one plane,
and the walls as another, here the planes in between are highlighted as lines
are drawn across them, confining and restricting our access to what is usually
not contemplated and just dismissed as empty space. Gaudi is often said to have
remarked that there was no such thing as a straight line in nature, inferring
that only man in his brash and insensitive gauche thuggery could be responsible
for something as garish as railway lines and as vulgar as steel girders, the
ugly underwear of skyscrapers. This architectural fallacy is confronted here
as it is on the drawing boards of architects in planning offices the world over, where
three dimensional space is rendered beautifully and faithfully into wire framed blueprints. 
The idea
of a projective plane was invented by the ancient Greeks who tried earnestly to find a simple and beautiful answer with which to model a
chaotic world. In Geometry the idea is that you have two lines and at some point they
intersect unless they are parallel in which case they never meet at all. This
was not quite simple enough for the Greek Geometers, and so they suggested a
Universal theorem in which they introduced a third line, the “line at infinity”
so that all lines now met and connected at some point, even if it was far away
on the infinite horizon.
Unravel the
edge of a circle, lay it out and you will find a straight line. Choi has here
revealed that beautifully above the limestone caves that run under the Karst
gallery in Plymouth’s Stonehouse. Children run about in and out of each hyper
real den as their parents step more warily attuned, as we all are, to the artificial
idea of boundary and the gallery space. There are no red ropes or taut wire here, telling
you where your place is in the art world, but rather an inextricable desire to
navigate the space within the installation is interwoven into the very fabric
of the concrete gallery in which it is housed. Turning off the lights has
removed all that cold oppressive white and the warm black underbelly of
Plymouth’s underground is revealed. It took a Berlin based Korean to mine such
a seam, but she has done so magnificently and caught more than the obvious regurgitated driftwood heritage of this emerging coastal city in her entrancing net.
