Choi’s work is distinguished for its hyper-realistic technique of portraying human bodies and its powerful metaphors contained therein. Figures and body parts in his work are distorted, exaggerated, abbreviated or mutilated, participating in a certain action or composing a certain structure. The artist portrays facets of human relations and contemporary psychology including society’s pathological state, gender politics, communication (or its absence), and isolation, oppression or anxiety of an individual devastated in the homogenized, uniform social structure. Remarkably delicate in detail yet also disturbing - even macabre, images of his work comprise a metaphor expressed in human bodies, their gestures and looks –at once extremely realistic and surrealistic – reflecting the artist’s acerbic observations and commentary on society. His sculptures that reveal mental maladies of contemporary people - lost; deficient; paranoid; and deprived of free will -, and violence hidden beneath the rationality of society expand to explore ontological questions about human existence and identity.

Choi Xooang began to be recognized from the early 2000’s for his miniature figurative sculptures made of painted polymer clay. Since 2007 his work has been enlarged in its scale, which gave more presence to his sculpture - as if a living object staged in space. Choi, born in 1975 in Seoul, Korea received an MFA from the Sculpture Department of College of Art, Seoul National University. Choi has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Seoul Museum of Art, Soma Museum, Seoul, Arko Art Center, Seoul and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. His works were also shown in Beijing, Singapore, Paris and Belgium. He won the Artists of Tomorrow Award 2010 at Sung-Gok Museum, Seoul, Korea.

Image: © Choi Xooang, Art Seasons