“Is there in fact anything as unstable and fickle as the act of seeing? There is no such thing as seeing purely and surely. Seeing is bound to change from moment to moment, influenced by the viewer's past experiences, preconceived notions, values, and direct information and knowledge from outside.”
– Choi Min, excerpt from “Art Works and Text” (1981)
The Choi Min Collection is a collection of 161 works and about 25,000 items of materials accumulated by the art critic Choi Min (1944-2018) throughout his life, which was donated to the City of Seoul and the Seoul Museum of Art by his family in 2019-2020. A widely-acclaimed critic, poet, educator, translator and curator, Choi also wrote and worked in a wide range of cultural and artistic fields, including fine art, film, photography and literature. He was the founding member of the art movement group Reality and Utterance which was established in 1979, and his assertion that art should reflect a new perception of reality in the new era influenced many artists at the time. For Choi, art was a variable which changed according to the needs of the times and society. Demonstrating deep and sharp insights, many of his writings are tremendously valuable as testimonies and records of an era.
The Choi Min Collection comprises a total of 161 works produced by 25 artists. Choi wrote exhibition reviews and artist essays for about 10 of the artists from 1983 to 2016. While Choi’s collection demonstrates an outstanding value as individual works, the collection is unparalleled in significance as a group of masterpieces that reflect a critic’s aesthetic viewpoint and his relationships with others. Choi had received his doctorate degree, researching the "impact of film on painting" centering on the French school of thought Nouvelle Figuration. He strove to explore the unique artistic characteristics and correlations through comparative research between various art mediums at a time brimming over with brilliant images. His fascination with genres such as painting, film, and photography and realist aesthetics can also be seen in the composition of his collection. In addition, Choi expressed skepticism toward seeing the artist's life being completely separate from his works. Such perspective is reflected in his writings, which demonstrate Choi’s warm attentiveness on the artists, and his desires to see, read, and feel the works in multiple perspectives with a unique open attitude.
Excerpts from Choi's writings related to the collection accompany the works in this exhibition to be read together. The exhibition suggests the way a critic sees the works as reflected in Choi’s remark, "Unlike what is generally thought about a work, the work looks differently depending on the viewer." When translating John Berger's book Ways of Seeing, Choi Min translated “Ways of Seeing” as “Seeing in a Different Way,” as opposed to multiple ways of seeing, emphasizing a new way of seeing that is different from the existing academic way. As there is not one standard way in seeing, a new way of seeing the works might be discovered in the light of his writing.
